Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
eric weinstein
his fourth time on the podcast both
sadness
and hope run through his heart and his
mind
and the result is a complicated
brilliant human being
who i am fortunate to call a friend
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and now here's my conversation with eric
weinstein you often talk about getting
off this planet
and i think you don't often talk
about extraterrestrial life intelligent
life out there
do you wonder about this kind of thing
about intelligent civilizations out
there
i do but i try to not wonder about it in
a particular way
um in a certain sense i do find that
speculating about bigfoot in the loch
ness monster and space aliens
is kind of a recreation for when things
aren't going very well
uh at least it gives us some meaning and
purpose in our lives
so i worry about you for example the
simulation hypothesis is taking over
from religion you can't quite believe
enough to go to church or synagogue or
the mosque
on the weekend so then you just take up
an interest in
in the simulation theory because that's
something like what you do for your job
coding
i do think that in some sense the issue
of aliens
is a really interesting one but has been
spoiled by too much
sort of recreational escapism
the key question that i find is
let's assume that it is possible to look
at the night sky
and see all of these distant worlds and
then go visit them
if that is possible it's almost
certainly possible through some
uh as yet uh unknown or
not accepted theory of physics beyond
einstein
and i mean it doesn't have to be that
way but probably is
if that theory exists there would be a
percentage
of the worlds that have life and sort of
a drake equation kind of a way
that would have encountered the ability
to escape
soon enough after unlocking the power
of the atom at a minimum and whatever
they have that is probably analogous to
the cell
on that world so assuming
that life is a fairly generic thing that
arises
probably not carbon-based probably
doesn't have dna but
that something that fits the pattern of
uh darwinian theory which is
descent with variation um differential
success
and thereby constantly improving and so
on that through
time there will be a trajectory where
there'll be something increasingly
complex and fascinating and beautiful
like us humans but much more
they can also off gas whatever entropy
it creates
to give an illusion that you're
defeating thermodynamics right so
whatever
whatever these things are probably has
an analog of the bilipid layer
so that cells can get rid of the chaos
on one side of the barrier and keep
order on the other
whatever these things are that create
life assuming that there is a theory to
be found that allows
that civilization to diversify
um we would have to imagine that
such a civilization might have taken an
interest
in its concept of the universe and have
come here
they would come here they would have a
deep understanding of the physics of the
universe sufficient to
have arrived here well there's two
questions whether they could arrive
physically and whether their
information could be sent here
and whether they could gain information
from us it's possible
that they would have a way of looking
into our world without actually reaching
it i don't know
but yes if my hope which is that we can
escape this world
is can be realized if that's if that's
feasible
then you would have to imagine that the
reverse is true and that
somebody else should be here
first of all i want to say this my
purpose when i come on
to your show and i reframe the questions
is not
to challenge you i can sit inside all of
those it's to give you better audio and
video because i think we've been on an
incredible role i really love what you
do and so i am trying to honor you by
being
as disagreeable about frame breaking as
possible i think some of your listeners
don't understand
that it's actually a sign of respect as
opposed to some sort of a
complex dynamic which is i think you can
play outside
of some of the frames and that these are
sort of offerings to get the
conversation started so let me try to
break that frame and give you something
different
beautiful i think what's going on here
is that i can prove
effectively that we're not thinking
about this in very deep terms
as soon as i say we've got to get off
this planet the number of people who
assume that i'm talking about faster
than light travel
is very high and faster than light
travel
assumes some sort of einsteinian
paradigm that then is broken
by some small adjustment and i think
that
that's fascinating it shows me that our
failure to imagine what could be being
said
is profound we don't have an idea
of all of the different different ways
in which
we might be able to visit distant worlds
all we think about is okay it must be it
must be einsteinian space times
and then some means of exceeding the
speed limit and it's just
it's fascinating to me that we don't
really have
we've lost the ability to just realize
we don't know the framework and what is
what does it even mean so one of the
things i think about
a lot is worlds with more than one
temporal dimension
it's very hard to think about one more
than one temporal dimension
so that's a really strong mental
exercise
of breaking the framework in which we
think because uh
most of the frameworks would have a
single temporal dimension right well
first of all most of the frameworks in
which we think would have no temporal
dimension and have pure
like in mathematics the differential
geometry that
riemann came up with in the 1800s
we don't usually talk about what we
would call split signature metrics
or lorentzian signature in fact if it
weren't for relativity this would be the
most
obscure topic out there almost all the
work we do is an euclidean signature and
then there's this one freakish case of
relativity theory in physics that uses
this one time and the rest spatial
dimensions
fascinating so it's usually momentary
and just looking at space
yes you know we have these three kinds
of
uh equations that are very important to
us we have elliptic
hyperbolic and parabolic right and so
the idea is
if if i'm chewing gum after eating
garlic bread
when i open my mouth and i've got
chewing gum between my lips
maybe it's going to form an elliptic
object called a minimal surface
then when i pop that and blow through it
you're going to hear a noise that's
going to travel to you by a wave
equation which is going to be hyperbolic
but then the garlic breath is going to
diffuse towards you and you're
eventually going to be very
upset with me according to a heat
equation which will be parabolic
so those are the three basic paradigms
for most of the work that we do
and a lot of the work that we do in
mathematics is elliptic
whereas the physicists are in the
hyperbolic case and i don't even know
what to do about more than one temporal
dimension because i think almost no one
studies that
i can't believe you just captured uh
much of modern physics
in the example of chewing gum i have an
off-color one which i chose not to share
but
hopefully the kids at home can imagine
okay so okay that is the place where we
come from
now if we want to arrive at a
possibility of breaking the frameworks
at with two versus zero temporal
dimensions how do we even begin to think
about well let's think about it as
you and i getting together in new york
city okay
so if you tell me uh eric i want to meet
you in new york city go to the corner
of i don't know 34th street
and third avenue and you'll find a
building on the northwest corner and go
up to the 17th floor
right so when we have third avenue
that's one coordinate 34th street that's
the second coordinate and go up to the
17th
and what time is that oh 12 noon all
right well now imagine that we traded
the ability to get up to a particular
height in the building it's all flat
land but
i'm going to give you two temporal cords
so meet me at 5 00 pm
and 12 noon at the corner of 34th and
3rd
that gets to be too mind-blowing i've
got two separate watches
and presumably that's just specifying a
single point
in those two different dimensions but
then being able to travel along those
dimensions
let's let me see your right hand
you have no watch on that no okay i'm
very
concerned lex that you're going through
life without
a wrist watch that is my favorite and
most valued wrist watch
i want you to wear it this guy is
funnier than basically any human on
earth
that has been in my family for months
it's a fitbit now what i want you to
understand is
lex fritman is now in a position to live
in two spatial and two temporal
dimensions unlike the rest of us
i clearly am only fit for four four
spatial dimensions
so i'm frozen whereas you can double
move
i can double move yeah which is funny
because this is set in
uh austin time yes it's 4 00 p.m and
this is set
in los angeles times well that's just
with an affine shift in mod 12
but my point is is that wouldn't that be
interesting if there were two separate
time skills and you had to coordinate
both of those
but you didn't have to worry about what
floor of the building because everything
was on the ground floor
okay that is the confusion that we're
having
and if you do one more show right then
they're gonna put a watch on your ankle
and you're only gonna have one spatial
dimension that you can move around
but my claim is is that all of these are
actually
sectors of of my theory in case we're
interested in that which is geometric
unity
there is a 2 2 sector and a 3 1 and a 1
3 and a 0 4 and a 4 0 and all of these
sectors
have some physical reality we happen to
live in a 1-3 sector
but that's the kind of thinking that we
don't do when i say we have to get off
this planet people imagine oh okay it's
just einstein plus some ability to break
the law
by the way even though you did this for
humor sake
i perhaps am tempted to pull a putin
uh who who i'm gonna get whacked
no not quite but he was given a
a super bowl ring to uh to look at
and he instead of just looking at it put
it on his finger and walked away with it
robert robert craft that's right so
[Laughter]
in the same way i will if you don't mind
walk away with this fitbit and taking
the entirety of your life story with it
because there's all these steps on it
boy have you lost a lot of weight
[Laughter]
and where have i been exactly right
that's what
that's what we're talking about we're
talking about you want to get into
aliens let's have an interesting alien
conversation let's stop having
the typical free will conversation the
typical alien conversation the typical
agi morality conference
it's like we have to recognize that
we're amusing ourselves because we're
not making progress
time to have better versions of all
these conversations is there
some version of the alien conversation
that could incorporate
the breaking of frameworks well i think
so i mean the key question would be
we've had the pentagon release multiple
videos of strange ufos
that undermined a lot of us i just think
it's also
really fascinating to talk about the
fact that those of us
who were trained to call bs on all of
this stuff
just had the rug pulled out from under
us by the pentagon choosing to do this
and you know what the effect of that is
you've opened the door for every stupid
theory
known to man my aunt saw a ghost
okay now we're gonna have to listen to
well hey
the pentagon used to deny it then it
turned out there were ufos dude
whoever is in charge of lying to the
public
they need a cost function that
incorporates the
damage and trust because i held this
line that this was all garbage and all
bs
now i don't know what to think there's a
fascinating aspect to this
alien discussion the breaking of
frameworks that involves the release of
videos
from the pentagon which is almost like
another dimension
that trust in itself or the nature of
truth and information
is a kind of dimension along which we're
traveling constantly
that is uh messing with my head to think
about because
i mean like because it almost feels like
you need to incorporate that
into your study of the nature of reality
it's like
the constant shifting of the
notation the tools we use to communicate
that reality
and so like what am i supposed to think
about these videos is it
is it a complete distraction is it a
kind of cosmic joke
i don't know but you know what i'm tired
of these people just completely tired of
these the
the the people on the pentagon side or
the people who are interpreting the
stuff on the pentagon side i'm tired of
the entirety i'm tired of the
authorities
playing games with what we can know
the fact that you and i don't do you
have a security clearance
some level of it for because i was
finding for darpa for a while
i don't have a security clearance you
know i
i am going to release whatever theory i
have
and my guess is is that there is zero
interest from our own government
and so the chinese will find out about
at the same time our government does
because lord knows what they do in these
buildings i i watch
crazy people walk in and out of the
intelligence community walk in and out
of darpa and
i think wow you're talking to that
person that's really fascinating to me
we don't seem to have a clue as to who
might have the ball
complete lack of transparency do you
think it's possible there's
the government is in possession of
something
deeply fundamental to understanding of
the world
that they're not releasing so this is
one one thing
is this is one of the famous
distractions that people play with the
narrative assume that that were true
of alien life forms uh spacecraft and
possession
that the government is in possession of
alien spacecraft that's assuming that
true narrative
yeah i don't think the government really
exists at the moment
i believe and this is not an idea that
was original to me
there was a guy named michael teitelbaum
who used to be at the sloan foundation
and at some point i pointed out the us
government had completely contradictory
objectives when it came to the military
and science
and one one branch said this one branch
said that i said you know i i don't
understand
which is true what does the government
want he said do you think there's a
government
and i said what do you mean he said what
makes you think that the people in those
two offices have ever coordinated
what is it that allows each office to
have a coherent plan with respect to
every other office
and that's when i first started to
understand that there are periods where
the government coheres
and then there are periods where the
coherence just decays and i think that
that's been going on since 1945
that there have been a few places where
there's been increased coherence but in
general everything is just getting less
and less coherent
and that what ward did was focus us on
the need
to have a government of people a mission
capacity
technology commitment ideology and then
as soon as that was gone
um you know different people those who'd
been
through world war ii had one set of
beliefs those born in the 1950s
uh you know or late 40s by the time they
got to woodstock
uh they didn't buy any of that so
coherence is the
is that the complete opposite of like
per uh of bureaucracy being paralyzed by
bureaucracy
so coherence is efficient functional
government because when you say there's
no government meaning there's no
uh emergent function from a collection
of individuals
it's just a bunch of individuals stuck
in their offices without any kind of
efficient communication with each other
on a single mission
and so a a government that is
truly at the epitome of what a
government is supposed to be
is when a bunch of people working
together what are we about are we about
freedom
are we about growth are we about decency
and fairness
uh are we about the absence of a
national culture so that we can all just
do our own thing
i've called this thing the usa and the
united states of absolutely nothing
these are all different visions for our
country
so it's possible that there's a alien
spacecraft somewhere
and there's of like 20 people that know
about it
and then they're kind of it like as you
communicate further and further into the
offices
that information dissipates it gets
distorted in some kind of way and then
it's completely lost the power the
possibility of that information is lost
we bought a house and i had this idea
that i wanted to find out what all the
switches did
and i quickly found out that your house
doesn't keep updating its plans
as people do modifications they just do
the modifications and they don't
actually record
why they were doing what they were doing
or what things lead you so they're all
sorts of bizarre
like there's a switch in my house that
says privacy
i don't know what privacy is does it
turn on an electromagnetic field that
is some lead shielding go over the house
um that's what we have we have a system
in which the people who've inherited
these structures have no idea why their
grandparents built them
i'd be fine if there's a freedom of
speech switch that you could also
control
and it would be perfect for well that's
different because
what they figured out is is that if they
can just make sure that we don't have
any public options for communication
then
hey every pri uh thing that we say to
each other goes to a private company
private companies can do whatever they
want
and this is like one of the greatest
moves that we didn't really notice
uh electronic and digital speech makes
every other kind of speech irrelevant
and because there is no public option
uh guess what there's always somebody
named sundar
or jack or mark who controls whether or
not you can speak and
what it appears to be that is being said
and whose stuff is weighted more highly
than other
it's an absolute nightmare and by the
way the silicon valley
intellectual elite lord knows what is
going on people are so busy making money
that they are not actually upholding any
of the values
so silicon valley is sort of maximally
against it it has this kind of
libertarian
uh free progressive
sheen to it when it goes to burning man
and then it quickly just
imposes rules on all of the rest of us
as to what we can say to each other if
we're not part of the inner elite
so what do you think the ideal of the
freedom of speech means
well this is very interesting i keep
getting lectured on social media by
people who have no idea how much power
the supreme
court has to abstract things right now
you have the concept of the letter of
the law and the spirit of the law
and the spirit of the law would have to
say that our speech that matters is free
at least at the level of ideas i don't
claim that i have the right
to endanger your life with speech or to
reveal your private information
so i really am not opining about
directed
speech intended to smear you and that
that's a different
kettle of fish and maybe i have some
rights to do that but i don't think that
they're infinite
um what i am saying is is that the
freedom of speech for ideas
is essential that the court abstracted
and
shove it down the throat of google
facebook twitter
amazon whoever these infrastructure
companies are
because it really matters which
abstraction you use the the case that i
really like
is search and seizure if i have private
data
that i entered in my house that is
stored on a server that you
hold outside of my house but
i view the is the abstraction that it's
only the perimeter of my house that i
have the right to protect
or does my password extend
the perimeter of my house to the data on
the server that is located outside of my
house
these are court our choices for the
court and the court is supposed to
pretend that they can divine the true
intent of the framers
but all of the sort of and i've taken
the calling this the problem of internet
hyenas people with ready-made answers
and
lols and you're such a these folks
love to remind you it's a private
company dude it can do whatever it wants
no the court has to figure out what the
abstractions are and just the way for
example
the griswold decision um found that
there was a penumbra because there was
too little in the constitution therefore
there were all sorts of things implied
that couldn't be in the document
somebody needs to come up with the
abstraction right now
that says jack cannot do whatever he
wants
it's really you say the courts but it's
also us
people who think about the world see you
it's the courts
but the courts don't do this we're toast
but we can still think about it i mean i
i'll sure
but i i don't feel like going down the
drain here's what i'm thinking about
because it's tricky how far
it should extend i mean that's an
ongoing conversation don't you think the
interpretation of the law
i think i'm trying to say something very
simple and it's just not going to be
popular for a while
tech dwarfs previous forms of
communication
print or shouting in a public park
and so you know i can go to a public
park and i can shout if i get a permit
even there i think was in the ninth late
1980s in atlanta
we came up with free speech zones where
you can't protest at a convention you
bet you can go to a park 23 miles out
and they'll fence off a little area
where you can have your free speech
no speech is dangerous ideas are
dangerous
we are a country about danger and risk
and yes i agree that targeted speech at
individuals trying to reveal their
private
stuff and all that kind of that is very
different so forget
a lot of that stuff but free speech for
ideas is meant to be dangerous
and people will die as a result of free
speech
the idea that one life is too much is
preposterous like why did we send
if one life is preposterous why do we
send anyone to the beaches of normandy i
just don't get this
so one thing that i was clearly bothered
by and maybe you could be my therapist
as well
i thought you were mine this is this is
a little bit of a miscommunication
on both of our parts then uh
because who's paying who for this
i was really bothered by uh amazon
banning parlor from aws because my
assumption was
that the infrastructure i drew a
distinction between aws
the infrastructure on which competing
platforms could be created is different
than the actual platforms so i
the standard of the ideal of freedom of
speech
i in my mind in a shallow way perhaps
apply differently
to aws than i did to twitter
it felt that we've created a more
dangerous world
that freedoms were violated by banning
a parlor from aws which i saw as the
computing infrastructure which enables
the competition
of tools the competition of frameworks
of communication
what do you think about this first of
all let me give you the the
internet hyena answer i understand dude
just build your own amazon yeah right
yes
well so that's a very shallow statement
but it's also
one that has some legitimacy we can't
completely dismiss it
because uh there's levels to this
to this game yes and no but if you
really wanted to chase that down
yeah one of the great things about a
person-to-person conversation as opposed
to like
let's have 30 of our closest friends
whenever we have a conversation with 30
of our closest friends
you know what happens it's like passing
light through a prism
every person says something interesting
and as a result it's always muddled
you like nothing ever resolves well one
of my
conversational techniques you mentioned
uh you push back is uh
uh first this childlike naivete and
curiosity
but also you are simulated real i'm
afraid
real all right so in this paradigm yeah
how could you not see this coming i mean
this i did a show with
um ashley matthews who's the woman
behind riley reed
and specifically about this it was about
the idea that if i
move away from politics and go towards
sex
i know that there's always a move to use
the infrastructure to shut down
sex workers and in this case
we had operation chokepoint under the
obama
uh administration we have a positive
passion
for people who want to solve problems
that they
they don't like this company they don't
like that company payday loans would be
another
one and so you have legal companies
that are harassed by our financial
system that her
you can't you know as riley reed
ashley couldn't get a mailchimp account
according to her if i understand
her correctly and this idea that you
charge these people
higher rates because of supposed
chargebacks on credit cards even if
their chargebacks are low
yes we have an unofficial policy of
harassment
there's something about everybody who
shows up at davos
they get drunk in the swiss alps and
then they come back home
and they coordinate and they coordinate
things like build back better
we don't really understand what
buildback better is but my guess is is
that buildback better
has to do with extremism in america how
do we shut down the republican party
as the source of extremism now i do
think the republican party has got very
extreme
under trump and i do believe that that
was responsive to how extreme the
democratic party
got under clinton first and then obama
and then hillary and in all of these
circumstances
it's amazing how much we want to wield
these things as weapons
well our extremism is fine because we
pretend that antifa doesn't exist and we
don't report what goes on in in portland
but your extremism my god that's
disgusting
this is the completely ridiculous place
that we're in and by the way
our friends in part are coked up on tech
money
and they don't appear to hold the
courage of their convictions at a
political level because
it's not in keeping with shareholder
value you know at some level
shareholder value is the ultimate shield
with
which everyone can cloak themselves well
on that point donald trump was
banned from twitter and i'm not sure it
was a good financial decision for
twitter
right uh but um perhaps you can correct
me if i'm wrong
but are you thinking locally or are you
thinking if twitter refused to
well if twitter refused to ban donald
trump what is the odds that
that the full force of the antitrust
division might find them i don't know oh
i see
i see so there's a complicated thing
well there's a
look these guys are all having a
discussion
in very practical terms you know you can
say you can imagine the sorts of
conversation
jack marks under really glad you're all
here we're all trying to
sing from the same hymnal and row in the
same direction
we understand free speech we're
completely committed to it but
we have to draw along with extremism
guys we we just need
we need to make sure we're all on the
same page well they use the term
violence too and they i think over apply
it
so basically anybody
[Laughter]
i'm i'm telling you i'm i say dumb
things
to uh to incentivize uh thoughtful
conversation well
whatever these things are there is no
trace
like how old are you lex you're in your
mid-30s yeah to late 40s
mid late 20s to late 40s yeah somewhere
in there that that's the demographic
i do think that partially what's
happened is that your group has never
seen functional institutions
these institutions have been so
compromised for so long
you've probably never seen an adult
sometimes i think elon looks like an
adult
i know that he has a wild lifestyle but
i also
see him looking like an adult what does
an adult look like exactly oh
you know somebody who weighs things
speaks carefully
thinks about the future beyond their own
life's lifespan
somebody was a pretty good idea of how
to get things done
isn't wildly caught up in punitive
actions is more focused on
breaking new ground than playing
rent-seeking games
i mean i really had a positive i was so
completely jazzed when elon musk ended
up as the world's richest person
he was like well that's interesting back
to work
it's just like that's that's what it is
that's what a grown-up would do and it
just made
you know weirdly i said something about
isn't it amazing that the world's
richest person knows what a lagrangian
is he made a terrible
lagrange joke about potentials but
yeah i mean i do think that ultimately
elon may be one of the closest things we
have to an adult
and i can tell you that the internet
hyenas will immediately descend as to
what a fraudster he is for pumping his
stock price talking his book and all
this stuff
shut up just looking at the world
seriously and rigorously you're saying
that the
people who are running tech companies or
running
the mediums on which we can
exercise the idea of free speech are not
adults
i think not i think first of all a lot
of them are silicon valley
utopian businessmen where you talk a
utopian line and you use it
you've heard my my take which is that
the idealism of every era is the cover
story of its greatest thefts
and i believe that in many ways the
idealism of silicon valley about
connecting the world a world of
abundance et cetera et cetera et cetera
is really about the uh software eating
the world as mark andreessen likes to
say
through all these legacy properties and
by simply being
a bad tech version of
something that previously existed like a
newspaper you could immediately
start to dwarf that by aggregating
newspapers in their digital versions
because digital is so much more powerful
as a result yes we have lots of
man-children wandering around what once
was the bay area and is now austin and
miami and other places
um maybe singapore that um
all of these people that you know these
are friends of ours and they're
brilliant
with respect to a certain amount of
stuff but none of them can get off the
drip
it's amazing that none of them have fu
money we've got billionaires who don't
have fu money
okay i think the argument used by jack
dorsey was that
there was an incitement of violence and
not just that growth
by everybody that was banning people
and then this word violence was used as
a kind of
uh just like extremism and so on to uh
without much reason behind it you think
it's impossible
for jack dorsey anybody else to be as
you said an adult a grown grown-up
and jack is pretty close to being the
guardian he seems like he is yeah
he's oh he's as he's under pressures as
you've discussed
he it seems that he's been on the verge
of almost being
quite serious and transparent and real i
don't know where the jack dorsey that i
met
went and i worry that that must be
something behind the scenes that i can't
see from my perspective what i think
is the stress the burden of that
when people are screaming at you it's uh
zen monk he really is yeah
jack is an incredibly impressive person
intellectually morally spiritually
at least for a couple of meetings
i don't know him very well but
i'm very impressed by the person i'm at
and i don't know where that person is
and that terrifies me but
do you think somebody could step up in
that way no
you so it does can does a human being
have the capacity
to be transparent about the reasoning
behind the banning
or do you think all banning eventually
uh all banning of people from mediums of
communication
is eventually destructive or it's
impossible for human beings to reason
with ourselves about it well let's let's
see what the problem is
so my phone has been on airplane mode
i'm going to unlock it
i'm going to take a picture of lex
ridden
now if i can i'm going to tweet that
picture out
great but here's the weird part about it
yeah um
that picture sitting
with lex today
this this ladies and gentlemen is called
the sausage is made
okay in so doing yes
i have just sent um
a picture of you and a tiny piece of
text
all over the planet that has arrived
at if statistics tell the truth just
under half a million different accounts
and then more from sharing and so on and
we have well
been some of those accounts are dead we
don't really know how many places it
went yeah
but the key issue with that tweet is
that
that is a non-local phenomenon
yes so i just
broadcasted to an entire planet somebody
in uganda
is reading that at the same time as
somebody in uruguay
there is no known solution
to have so many people with the ability
to communicate
non-locally because locality was part of
the implicit nature of speech
inside of the constitution friction
locality there were all sorts of
other aspects to speech so if you think
about speech as a bundle
i like this then it got unbundled
and some of those aspects that we were
naturally counting on to
uh the impact of speech aren't present
and we don't have the courage to say i
wonder if the first amendment really
applies
in the modern era in the same way or we
have to work through an abstraction
either we probably have to amend the
constitution or we have to abstract it
properly
and that issue is
not something we're facing up to i watch
us
constantly look backwards
we don't seem to try to come up with new
ideas and new theories nobody really
imagines that we're going to be able to
wisely amend the constitution anymore in
the inside of the united states many
people
abroad will say why are these guys
talking about the u.s it's a u.s centric
program
well that's because nobody knows where
this program lives
the fact by the way that you and i
happen to be in a physical place
together
is also bizarre could be anywhere it
doesn't really matter that it happens to
be here
so the difference between logical
between physical local non-local
frictional non-fictional
it's the same thing with firearms
nobody imagined that the gatling gun
was going to be present when you had to
reload a musket
and that's fascinating to think about i
mean
you you're exactly right that the nature
of this particular freedom that seems so
foundational to the
to this nation to what made
this nation great and perhaps much of
the world that is great made a great
is changing completely can we try to
reason through how the idea of
freedom of speech is to be changed i
mean
i guess i'm struggling it feels really
wrong
perhaps because i wasn't paying
attention to it it feels really wrong to
ban
donald trump now from twitter
to to ban not just the president that's
really wrong
to me but this particular human for
being uh
divisive but then when there is an
incitement of violence
that is an overused claim but
perhaps there was uh actual uh brewing
of local violence happening so one of
the things i know what's happening on
parlor
is people were uh
scheduling meetings together in physical
space so
you're now going going back from this
dynamic social large scale people from
uganda people from all over the world
being able to
communicate you're now mapping that into
now back
meeting in the physical space that is uh
similar to what the founding but the
violence were digital
if ransomware suddenly was unleashed
um true the key issue is the
abstractions
so what was freedom of speech as a
bundle
and now it's and then how do we abstract
the bundle
into the digital era do you think we
just need to raise the question talk
about it do you have
do you have ideas because sure i have
ideas but the key point is
that i'm not even welcome in mainstream
media
i've never seen you on mainstream media
do you do mainstream media so we
we exist in part of an alternate
universe because the mainstream media
is trying to have a coherent story which
i've called the gated institutional
narrative
and the institutions pretend that they
plug their fingers
uh in their ears and pretend that
nothing exists outside
of msnbc talking to cnn about what was
in the new york times
as covered by the washington post and so
that's effectively like a professional
wrestling promotion
where they you know the undertaker faces
off against hulk hogan and
rowdy roddy piper okay well
that's very different than mma you've uh
recently been on
glenn beck's program yeah and there was
this
kind of one of the things you've talked
about
is being able to have this conversation
i don't know if you would put it as a
type of conversation that was happening
outside the mainstream media
but a conversation that reaches across
different world views you're right
having a nuanced
or just like a respectful conversation
that's grounded and mutual
but we can't have the reality because
the main model is is
um the center both left and right is in
the process of stealing all the wealth
that we built up
and they've organized the extremes uh
into two larping teams that i've called
magistan and wikistan and
then you have everybody who isn't part
of that complex all seven of us
the number of us who are able to earn a
living looking at all of these mad
people
playing this game you know there's a
phrase
inside finance when the investment banks
are
trying to look at price action and
somebody says this doesn't make any
sense
and somebody will say it's just the
locals stealing from each other and
that's really what we have we have we've
got the leaders of magastan and wikistan
uh you know championing these two teams
is sponsored by the center because it's
a distraction while they steal all the
silver and
cut the paintings out of the frames
that's what we
you and i are looking at so when you ask
me like do you have any ideas about the
abstraction for free speech
i've never met mark zuckerberg i've
never met sunder pichai
i never met larry page i was once in a
room with sergey brin
i've never spoken to elon musk
i hang out with peter thiel but we have
a very deep relationship but i don't
really speak to that many other people
at you know sort of at this level
we're not having any kind of smart
conversation
at a national level in fact it's almost
as if
we've destroyed every sandbox
in which we could play together there's
no place
that we actually talk except long-form
podcasting
and by the way they've found you see
what's going on with like alex stamos
and the hoover institution we've you
know that there's a loophole left
long-form podcasting allows people to
speak
at levels above daytime cnn yeah it's
like
well why do you think they're not
watching daytime cnn
but you know that's that's just silly
journalism
they uh currently have no power to
displace podcasting that's why it's so
powerful rss feed i mean that's why the
big
challenge with joe rogan and spotify is
like there's this dance that's
fascinating to see
is joe rogan is not part of the system
and then he's also uncancelable and
there's this
tension that's happening well howard
stern
howard stern became much less relevant
so if they can't control joe by bringing
him in house
the key question is is he going to
continue
like you know this joe says the thing
about fu money
yeah joe's one of the only people with
fu money who's actually said fu
yeah yeah i don't understand this
i don't have fu money what what exactly
is can we break apart a few money
because
i always thought i've been fortunate
enough
to have always have fu money in the
sense that my standards were so low
that a basic salary in the united states
this is the stoic point
which is yeah you can live on rice and
beans right you're uncancelable because
you're always rich relative to your
needs
right isn't that fu fundamental if you
mind why do you say that tech
billionaires don't have fu money
when you need to hire private security
to protect your family
how do you protect your two children i
don't have those yet bingo
yeah my point is is that fu money
insulates everything that you care about
it's not just about you
so you're saying as the level of
responsibility grows
the amount of money required for fu
we have a war going on the war is on
academic freedom
academic freedom used to be present in
the system as a
in terms of the idea we we trust our
elite
now we have an idea like you want to be
the elite
you know you want a lord above us that's
like first of all there's like a
populist anti-elitist thing
then there's the idea that we're going
to defer
tenure for forever then we're going to
tell people stay in your lane your
tenure is only good for your own
particular tiny micro subject
then we're going to also control your
grants and we'll be able to
load up your teaching load if we don't
like who you are will make your life
absolutely impossible we lost
academic freedom and we ushered in peer
review which was a disaster
and then we lost funding so that people
were
confident that they would have the
ability to do research
no matter what they said and as a result
what you find is is a world in which
there's no ability
to get people to say no i'm not going to
sign your diversity and inclusion
forced loyalty oath i won't sign any
loyalty oath
get the hell out of my office
you a few and you you're connecting
money to that but
well my point is is that academic
freedom is
the the whole idea behind it was that
you will have the freedom of a
billionaire
on a much smaller salary right okay
we've lost that yeah the only reason in
part
that i wanted to go into
academic academics as a profession as
opposed to
wanting to do physical or mathematical
research
the great prize was freedom and ralph
gomorry
uh of the sloan foundation previously of
ibm research pointed it
out he says if you lose freedom you lose
the only thing we had to offer top minds
top minds value their intellectual
freedom and their physical and
economic security at a different level
than other human beings
and so people say you know
i understand dude you have the ability
to do x y and z what's the problem it's
like well i value my ability to raise
the middle finger as an american
practically above everything else i want
to talk to you about
freedom here in the context of something
you've mentioned
which is one way to take away freedom
is to put a human being into a cage
to create constraints the other one that
worries me is something that i think
you've spoken to to twitter a little bit
on twitter is
we bleed freedom by
kind of slowly
uh scaring you into not
doing not expressing the full spectrum
of opportunities you can as freedom so
like when you ban donald trump
[Music]
when you uh ban uh parlor
you give a little doubt in the minds of
millions like
me a person who's a tech person who's an
entrepreneur entrepreneur there's a
little that's what i'm afraid of when i
look in the mirror is there now a little
doubt in there
sure that that limits the amount of
options i will try
how certain are you that the covid
virus didn't come from the wuhan lab and
his biosafety level four
we both know that we're both supposed to
robotically say
the idea that the covet virus came from
a lab is a discredited conspiracy theory
there is no evidence that suggests that
this is true
the world health organization and the
cdc have both opined this
to say otherwise would be incredibly
irresponsible and the threat of that
is the thing that ultimately limits
the the freedoms we feel i should be
tweeting about jeff epstein all the time
and you're afraid well it's awesome i
mean i said it
in the public yeah many times why is it
we don't ask where the
records are from villard house where
where are the financial records where
the sec filings
yeah where are the questions on on the
record to the intelligence
uh agencies was he known to be part of
the intelligence community
so so we're we're not interested in
asking questions like am i going to die
as a result of asking the question was
jeff epstein part of the intelligence
community
of any nation is there a reason we're
not asking about the financial records
of the supposed hedge fund that he
didn't run
just like the wuhan lab okay how do we
get to the core of the jeffrey epstein
the the truth behind jeffrey epstein in
a sense
i mean there's there's some things that
are just like useless conspiracy
theories around it even if they're true
there's some things that get through i
hate to say it you're not gonna like it
look at the 1971 media pennsylvania
break-in of the citizens committee to
investigate the fbi
those kids and by the way they weren't
all kids
did what had to be done they broke in
they broke the law it was an incredible
act of civil disobedience
and god blessed judy feingold for taking
to her
she was going to take to her grave that
she'd been part of this like the coolest
thing of all time
they didn't say anything for forever so
civil disobedience
i mean you have to we are founded on
civil disobedience civil disobedience is
incredibly
you screw it up and you're just a vandal
you screw it up you're a hooligan
yeah those those cats were so
disciplined it's an art form and it was
an art form
and they risked everything they were
willing to pay
with their freedom those
are the sorts of people who earned the
right by putting themselves at risk i
would not
do this i am not volunteering to break
into
anything i think it was uh william
davidon
who was a student of murray gelman and a
physics professor at haverford
who corralled these people and led this
effort and right now what we need
is somebody to blow the lid off of what
is controlling everything
we have i i'm happy
to hear that it's a system of incentive
structures that it's a system of
selective pressures i'm happy to find
out that it's emergent
i'm happy to find that it's partially
directed by our own intelligence
community
i'm happy to hear that uh in fact we've
been penetrated
by north korea iran china and russia but
i need to know
why people aren't like the firebombing
of the courthouse in portland oregon has
no explanation
and somehow this is normal this is not
normal to any human being
we have video that people don't believe
and you know i come back to the shaggy
defense
of it wasn't me you know so
it's like um
you remember that song shaggy yeah it
wasn't me caught you
uh banging the counter on the couch yeah
exactly it wasn't me it wasn't me he
says but
his friend says well your strategy makes
no sense at all
this is what msnbc is doing
you dropped him from the graphic it
wasn't me it wasn't me you came up with
another yang
it wasn't me i will never see msnbc
the same again so you've spoken about
him before i think it'd be nice to
maybe honor him to break it apart a
little bit
aaron schwartz yeah uh why was he a
special human being
in this ilk of what we're talking about
now
civil disobedience um how do we honor
him
now moving forward as human beings who
are
willing to take risks in this world well
i don't know
i mean are you inspired by aaron
schwartz
i am how do you feel about jstor let's
talk about jstor first
so let's let's let's say what jstor is
all about
we the taxpayer pay for research
and then
the people who do the research do all
the work for a bunch of companies
who then charge us thirty dollars an
article
to read what it is that we already paid
for and if we don't cite these articles
we're told that we're in violation okay
i almost never call for civil
disobedience because i don't really want
to
but jstor
elsevier springer who the
are these people yeah
get the smart people
need to take the greedy people behind
the woodshed and explain to them what
science is
i have a very old-fashioned idea that's
so out of favor
that i will immediately be seen as
knuckle dragger yeah
i believe in the great woman theory of
history and the great man theory of
history
emmy nerder is fantastic
as an example and i believe in
editors over peer reviewers and i
believe that
wrong things should be allowed into the
literature and i believe that the
gatekeeping
should go towards zero because the costs
associated with distribution are very
very slight i believe that
um we should be looking at the perverse
incentives
of sending your paper blindly into your
competitors clutches particularly if
you're a young person
being reviewed by an older person uh are
you familiar with the
the duatta senor are you familiar with
the legend of the magnaya
now the magnaya is the miller's daughter
and the largest
food fight in the entire universe i
believe
is held i think in italy uh it's called
the battle of the oranges
and it celebrates the miller's daughter
who had fallen in love with her beloved
and when it came time for them to marry
the virginal magnaya was in fact
told that the lord of the land
had the right to have the first night
with the bride
well the magnaya had a different idea so
she seemed to consent to this
uh perhaps mythical right also called
the
the primonote the first night and
by by legend she concealed a dagger
underneath her robes
and when it came time for the the hated
lord of the manor to extract
uh this right she pulled the knife out
and killed him
and i think it also echoes a little bit
of particularly wonderful scene from
game of thrones
but that inspired both men and women
and the magnaya is the legendary hero
right now what we need to do is we need
to resist the primo note the right of
first look
right fu you don't have to write a first
look i don't want to send something
blindly to my competitors i don't want
to subject myself to you naming what
what work i've done why why are you in
my story
that's my question get out of my story
if i do work
and then you have an idea oh well it's
the matthew principle to him
who has much more will be given i've
gone to the national academy of sciences
and talked about these things
and it's funny i've been laughed at by
the older people who think
well eric you know science proceeds
funeral by funeral that's plonk
you know the matthew principle you know
the matilda principle the things done by
women are attributed to men
these are not new you're like and you
guys just live like this
yeah so the revolutionary act now is to
resist all of these things that
we need these things that are not new so
you asked me about aaron schwartz aaron
schwartz was the magniah
one of the things you've done very
beautifully is to communicate
love and i think about you know some of
our conversations
you got me to talk a little bit about my
own experiences and
0 2 1 3 8 and 3 9.
we are the product of our trauma
and what people don't understand is that
very often when you see people
taking counter measures against what
appear to be imaginary forces
they're really actually replaying things
that really happen to them
and having been through this system and
watching all of the ways in which it
completely rewrites the lives of the
people who i'm counting on to cure our
diseases build our new industries keep
us safe from our foes
the amount of pressure the system is
putting on the
most hopeful minds is unimaginable
and so my my goal is to empower somebody
like
aaron schwartz in memory and
to talk about a jeffrey epstein
situation did you know that the first
person
outside of me to get a look
at geometric unity was jeffrey epstein
how did he know i was working on this i
don't know
so your ideas that formed geometric
community was something that uh his eyes
have seen
i was pushed to talk to jeffrey epstein
as one of the only people who could help
me
no no listen to this how does this yeah
how does this connect okay
well first of all my old
synagogue my old shule was the
conservative minion at harvard hillel
and i believe it's called rusofsky hall
after henry rusofsky in the economics
department who was a japan scholar if
i'm correct
and he became provost or dean of harvard
i believe that that was built with
jeffrey epstein's money
and i wondered in part whether the
jewish students
at harvard all sort of passed through a
bottleneck of harvard hilla
so that was something i found very
curious but i don't know much about it
i also found that jeffrey epstein
hanging around scientists i don't think
that either you or joe exactly
i mean got me correct uh in your
last interchange uh for the record for
people who haven't listened to joe rogan
program
joe has claimed that eric weinstein was
the only person who has gotten laid paid
oh paid and you said you also got paid
as a young man
right i believe the word was laid but uh
allegedly
my hearing isn't so good at age 55. yeah
all right leaving that aside yes
um what was jeffrey epstein doing
hanging around
all of these scientists i don't think
that was the same program
that was about compromising political
leaders and business people
and entertainment figures i think these
are two different programs that were
being run through one individual
and joe seemed to think that i didn't
think he was smooth i thought he was
glib
i think what joe is really trying to get
out of is that i found his
mysticism meretricious he had a ability
to deflect
every conversation that might go
towards revealing that he didn't know
what he was talking about every time you
started to get close
to something where the rubber hit the
road the rubber wouldn't hit the road
and yet can you help me untangle the the
fact that you thought
deeply about the physics of the nature
of our universe and jeffrey epstein
was interested how did he know i wasn't
really talking about this stuff until
you know even my close friends didn't
really know what i was up to
and yet you're saying he he did not have
sufficient brilliance to understand when
the rubber hit the road so
why why did he have sufficient
interest and tell me what i thought i've
been waiting to find out does my
government
even know i exist do you have an answer
to that question
i have a couple times the government has
reached out to me
in general there is zero interest in me
like less than zero interest
i find that fascinating as far as you
know right
i mean well that's what i'm trying to
say the question about not being able to
see through a half-silvered mirror
you don't know what's going on behind
the half-silvered mirror to you it's a
it's all you see
is uh is your reflection but your
intuition still holds
like this is where i mentioned that i uh
this is where i'll say naive dumb
things but i still hold on to this
intuition that
jeff not i'm not confident in this but i
i'm
leaning towards that direction that
jeffrey epstein is the source of evil
not something that's
underlying him you have you have a bias
it's different than mine arbazian priors
are tutored by different life
experiences
if i was mostly concerned like sam
harris was is concerned that people fill
their heads with nonsense
i would have a very strong sense that
people need order in the world
that they take mysterious situations
they build entire castles in the air and
then they go move in if they
really get crazy you know the old saying
is that neurotics
build castles in the air and psychotics
move in coming from a progressive family
we had a different experience it's
really weird when the government is
actually out to get you when they
actually send a spy
when they actually engage in
disinformation campaigns when they smear
you
and if you've ever had that brought to
bear on your family you have a howard
zinn
sort of understanding of the country
which is different than having a
wow do people believe crazy stuff
because they watch too much tv
and both of these things have some merit
to them but it's a question of regulated
expression when do you want to express
more sam harris and when do you want to
express more howard zinn
and you can express both correct the one
human being can just pass both sure but
there's a trade-off between them
in other words most of most people like
the michael shermers of the world are
going to tilt very strongly to
extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence you're going to
have that kind of energy
and then somebody else is going to say
how many times do i have to get hit on
uh
you know how many times i have to hammer
my own thumb before i realize that
there's a problem
so you know my feeling about this is yes
people
see patterns in clouds they see faces
and scripture and all sorts of things
and it's just random cloud patterns
and it's also the case that there's
tremendous pressure not to see
conspiracies when conspiracies are
relatively more common
than the people who shout conspiracy
theory will claim
so both of these things are true and you
have to ask when do you express your
inner
zen and when you're in harris and those
are different
one fundamental difference you and i
biases aside
is you've actually met jeffrey epstein
and i'm
uh listening to like reverberations
years later of stories and narratives
throughout the story luckily i only met
him once and i i think i had
one or perhaps two phone conversations
with him other than the one meeting
you can learn a lot in just a few words
right from a human being well that's
true but i think that
the bigger issue was i saw something
that i don't hear much remarked upon
which is
jeffrey epstein is all there that there
is
in other words there's the national
science foundation national institute of
health howard hughes
there's all this stuff
that kind of has the same feel to it a
little bit of variation and difference
department of energy if you fall outside
of that
there's just jeffrey epstein that's what
you're told yes
that's not quite true there's kavli
maybe jim simons is now in the game
peter thiel has done some stuff you had
yuri milner and
mark zuckerberg try so there is other
money running around
templeton but very strongly there was a
belief
that if you're doing something really
innovative and the system can't fund it
because it's
we've become jeffrey epstein's
your guy
because this funnel that you're supposed
to go through
that's right and the idea is that you
get called to the great man's house
and you know the sort of uh
lubricious version of ralph lauren
you know takes you in and asks you
bizarre questions and maybe he has an
island maybe he has a plane
and you know when you're starved
uh you know somebody showing you a feast
or when you're
dehydrated in a death's door and
somebody says oh
you know i have a well
you know that's what it is and so the
thought is wow
can you can somebody get some effing
money into the science system so that we
don't have
super creeps uh trying to learn all of
our secrets ahead of time
wtf what is your problem with
transparency and taxpayer dollars just
all of you you wouldn't have a country
you'd be speaking german
so essentially you believe that human
beings would not be able to
in the when the money is lacking in the
system like on research produce public
goods
you and i are meant to produce public
goods
now i sell athletic greens and i sell
theragan and i sell unagi scooters
and chili pad i can't be honest i love
these products
but i didn't get into this game
for the purpose of selling i'm trying to
figure out
how do you have an fu lifestyle
but you know something lex i don't know
why you built this channel
it's kind of a mystery wait i don't know
why i'll tell you why i built my channel
the face it's gonna be a lot harder to
roll me this time in an alley
yeah i got rolled multiple times and my
point is
i didn't want to become a celebrity i
didn't want to become well known
but it's a lot harder to roll somebody
who's getting you know i think i'm i
don't know if this is mistaken but i
think i'm the math phd with the largest
number of followers on twitter
and there was nothing you could do
before
i mean again to put a little
responsibility on you so you've created
something
really special for the distribution of
your own ideas i mean
uh but because it's not necessarily
currently scalable
you also perhaps you and i have the
responsibility
of giving other people also a chance to
spread their ideas
i mean joe rogan did this very
effectively for a bunch of people
that that's why they're angry at him
because he's a gatekeeper
and he let all sorts of people through
that gate
from roger from roger penrose to alex
jones
to uh jordan peterson to
i mean even first of all to you and to
abby martin
to abby martin to barry weiss yeah
that's the problem well but you
you have not successfully built up a
thing that allows that to carry
no no we are all
vulnerable to reputational attack
because what happens you see the problem
lexus is that you are now an institution
at some level
you walk around with all this equipment
in a duffel bag
uh the last thing is the last suit
you'll ever need
and um you have the reach
of something like cnn to people who
matter
okay so now the question is how do we
control something
that doesn't have a board doesn't have
shareholders it doesn't have to make sec
files
fcc so the best
answer they have is well
we just have to destroy reputations all
it takes is for us to take
something that gets said or done or
alleged
and i think it's incredibly important
one of the things people don't
understand is
that i'm i'm going to fight general
reputational attacks
not because some people don't deserve to
have their reputations drawn
dragged through the mud but because it's
too powerful of a tool
to hand it to cnn msnbc princeton
harvard
the state department yes but is some of
it is also
jp morgan muhammad ali style
being good enough at
doing everything you need to do without
giving enough
meat for the reputational attacks not
being afraid but not giving enough
meat i don't see why the people who have
good ideas have to lead lives that are
that clean
if you can do it you can be messy yeah
you should be able to be messy that
otherwise
we're we're suppressing too many people
too many two billion minds
yeah can you believe elon musk smoke the
blood
i still people tell me this that okay i
have discussions about elon
and people uh the
avi loeb the harvard scientist
you know who's talking about omoamoa
that it might be alien technology
he told me his
this outside the box thinker yeah
when speaking to me about elon
said called him the guy who smoked
he smokes weed he's the blunt in a
dismissive way
like this guy is crazy because he smoked
some weed
i was looking at him i was like why
wow wow i think you should be able to
have
consensual drug-filled orgies
perfect lives
yeah you should be allowed to be messy
you're right i take back my statement
i'm just saying
respectability is the unique prison
where all of the gates are open and the
inmates
beg to stay inside it's time to end
their prison of respectability because
it's too effective of a means of
sidelining and silencing people
including
it is better that we have bad people
in our system than this idea
of no platforming people who are beyond
the pale
because it's such a simple technique so
how do we uh
what's the heroic action here on the
well for example having ashley matthews
on my program
by the way she was absolutely um
delightful as a guest she was
she is polite in the extreme far more
polite than i am
and i had her right after roger penrose
uh as a guest because i wanted to
highlight this
program can go anywhere we can talk to
anyone what about social media you've
started highlighting people being banned
on social media
how do we fight this like if you get
banned from social media so you're
saying nobody will stand up to me
well just figure out what your incentive
structure is before assume that they're
assuming i get banned on social media
because somebody wants to make sure that
my message doesn't
uh interfere with the dominant narrative
okay
what will happen by the way i'm very
glad to be able to explain this on your
show because
that video will presumably be archived
and they can't easily make
you take it down okay so
what's going to happen is that there'll
be a whole bunch of very low quality
bot like accounts that dog you every
time you talk about me
right dude it's getting old getting
boring we already heard you
dude that was like let it go not a good
look
not a good look it's one of my favorites
but what about the high profile ones
well then you'll get a few high-profile
ones and some of the high-profile ones
command armies right like at some point
i had 10 000 people using exactly the
same templated tweet
uh tweeting at me it was just actually
it got to the point where it was funny
because
everybody said did you did you hear that
in hipster coffee shop i was like
why are you all suddenly talking about
hipster coffee hilarious
um those things will cause you to think
better of it
you'll start to see your follower can't
go down because it's easy
to give you a bunch of bot like follows
and then just pull them
so i think it's pretty well known how
and then maybe your account will be
suspended and it can't be revoked and
you know et cetera et cetera and then
three days later you'll be told it was
an error
so let me push back i just don't see not
defending you
like okay so what are the things you
would do
that given that i can actually talk to
you yeah offline
that that would uh make me not defend
you
uh well it's first of all i can't
i mean no but i can imagine some but all
of us have
things if somebody says do you hear what
your boy lex said about you
what what did lex say about me oh he
said you were flawed dude
oh yeah you know
they so distrust because none of us want
to stand behind flawed people
that's why you have everybody rushing to
say i neither condemn nor condone i know
i don't condemn narc
you know why what is that we're all
trying to say for the record
i said that eric is smarter than me and
a brilliant human being
but flawed like all humans are my point
is
i've now come up with a new policy which
is i don't care
what my friends have done i am not
disavowing my friends
not because they didn't do the wrong
thing maybe they did do the wrong thing
i don't know what's the value of
friendship if you
if that's not that like for example
we've had the situation with brian cowan
brian cowan was featured recently in the
los
angeles times i know nothing about the
allegations
i can't i didn't even know brian at the
time right i've known him for
roughly the time i've been in los
angeles maybe a year and a half
during that period of time never seen
anything wrong
now i'm in a situation what do you think
he did do you think he didn't like
you know what i don't know but i do know
this
everyone's entitled to have friends
because we can't afford isolated people
and if your friends do the wrong thing
they're still your friends
yeah and if they do terrible terrible
things you bring that up with
them privately and it's not my
responsibility to disavow in public
you know we've had this situation that i
don't like
where you know particular people that
i've been close to
i'm put under tremendous pressure to
disavow them what do you think now about
your buddy
i like dave rube and all that kind of
stuff here's the thing
just because my friends are my friends i
don't disavow my friends
we all need to make a statement
that we will not be brought under
pressure to disavow our friends
our family members because
mass murderers are dangerous
the more isolated they become it is not
a good idea
to constantly push to isolate people yes
and it's dangerous and so it sends a
signal to everybody else to uh
to fit in to be more extremely cynical
about the human so my
i find out you've been selling heroin to
elementary school students
you're still my friend and i will not be
disavowing you and if i have a problem
with you selling heroin
to elementary school students during
school hours
i will bring it up with you privately
because we don't need to hear my voice
added to that condemnation are there
things that you could do
that would cause me to say actually f
this guy yeah
above and beyond that but simply doing
the wrong
thing i think we've gone down a terrible
path
i think isolated people are about the
most dangerous thing we could have
in a heavily armed society so i i deeply
agree with you
on brian cowell and on all these people
that quote-unquote got canceled
uh and i'm not saying that they i don't
i don't know the truth value because we
can't
and even if i did know the truth value
i'm not setting up an incentive
structure
for the personal destruction as a means
of letting
institutions combat the fact that
individuals are the last thing that can
say none of you guys make any sense
i don't treat these things like you know
i had a conversation where kevin spacey
was at the dinner table when i came down
from a hotel room
and i had a very long conversation with
kevin spacey i will not
detail because i don't do that as to
what we discussed
but we talked very specifically about
him being cancelled
and i don't think that the world has
heard that story in part because
there is a very strong sense that he has
to be outgrouped
and as a result you know i mean do we
want
do we want to disavow the space program
because it touched verner von braun do
we want to disavow quantum mechanics
because pascal jordan and werner
heisenberg pass through it
is erin fess theorem false because he
murdered his child
i mean at what point do we recognize
that
we are the problem humans are humans and
there is no perfect there is no perfect
group of people even all of the most
oppressed people the supposed victims of
the world who we now have fetishized
into thinking that they're all
oracles because their lived experience
informs us
and their pain is more salient than
everyone else's pain
those people aren't necessarily great
people you know
it's like none none of us we can't we
can't do this
in this fashion so when we sit down to
have a conversation
across the table from somebody you
should be willing to
like you should not have npr in your
mind you should be willing to take the
full risk
and to see the good in the person
without with limited information
and to do your best to understand that
person everybody is entitled to a
hypocrisy budget
i don't believe this is of institutions
yeah okay
everybody is entitled to a certain
amount of screwing up in life
you're entitled to a mendacity budget
you're entitled to an aggression budget
the idea of getting rid of everybody is
you know people haven't even blown
through their budgets and we're already
yeah i i think about for example one
person uh
i'd be curious to get your thoughts
about alex jones
let's not talk about alex jones for a
second let's talk about the national
enquirer
is everything the national enquirer says
false
uh no okay do you remember the john
edwards story
uh his wife sorry he had a child from an
extramarital affair
yes i believe that the national enquirer
broke the story
and then what does the new york times do
the new york times i think is
allowed to report that the national
maguire is making a claim
that way they don't have to substantiate
the story so
why is the new york times talking to
mike cernovich
or using the national enquirer as a
source are they using alex jones as the
source
who here's the big problem that we're
having
why are certain people entitled to talk
to everybody
and other people are entitled to talk to
no one i don't really understand
this is an indulgence system this is how
the catholic church used to do things
it's hard to fight the system because
the reason you don't talk to alex jones
is because the platforms on which you do
the communication will
will de-platform but i'm not platformed
i used to
i used to do npr and i used to do the
newshour
and i used to provide stories to
washington post new york times that has
gone away they've circled the wagons
closer and closer
and more of us are unacceptable and
right now i have no question that
they're
going through anybody who has a platform
trying to say okay what do we have
against that person in case we need to
shut that down
we have to make a different decision lex
and the different decision
is that it doesn't matter how many times
joe said the n word yeah it doesn't
matter
that somebody else you know
like with mathematical theorems if the
worst person in the world proves a
mathematical theorem like the unabomber
we can't undo the theorem yeah you know
and i point out charles manson's song
look at your game girl is an amazing
song
it's a really good song i don't think
it's one of the greatest songs ever
but it happens that he wasn't a no
talent
and you know i don't know how hitler was
as an artist
it's actually not bad okay we've got to
get past this
we've got to get past this idea that
we're going to purge ourselves of our
badness and we're just gonna
this is like i've likened it to teenage
girls and cutting we're just
all we're doing is destroying ourselves
in search of perfection
and the answer is no we're not perfect
we're flawed we're screwed up
and we've always been this way and we're
not going to silence everyone
who you can point a laser beam at and
say well that person
look at how bad that person is if we do
that
kiss the whole thing goodbye we might as
well just let's learn chinese
but there is an art to having those
messy conversations
whether with with alex or anybody else
okay let's talk about alex
yeah there's particular stuff that alex
does that's absolutely nauseating
and there's other stuff that he's doing
that's funny the methodology of
of the way he carries and sometimes he's
talking about the truth
and sometimes he's talking about a
conspiracy theory his variance is
incredibly high
the right way to approach alex jones or
james o'keefe or the national enquirer
anything you don't like
is to say great go long short
i mean well if you invest in a mutual
fund
all the stocks in the mutual fund are
held long
but if you invest in a hedge fund you do
something called relative value trade
it's like well you long tech or short
tech
well actually i'm long microsoft and i'm
short google why is that oh because i
believe google got way
too much attention and that microsoft
has been unfairly maligned
and so this is really a play on legacy
tech over
more modern tech okay which part of alex
jones are you long and which part are
you short one of the things that should
be a requirement for being a reporter is
like what
what did donald trump do that was good
nothing
okay then you're not a reporter what did
hitler do that was good
the rosenstrasse protest
non-jewish women campaign for their
jewish men to be returned home to them
from certain death almost in death camps
it should have been that not there were
no death camps it should have been that
everybody was returned home
but you know what the fact that the the
women of the rosen straw support
i mean sorry i get very emotional about
you know some of the baddest ass
chicks in the world got
their husbands returned to them cola
could vote
and not i'm not celebrating hitler
hitler's
the worst of the worst but god damn it
you know
this idea that we can just say
everything that person does is a lie
everything that person does is evil
this reflects a simplicity of mind that
humanity cannot afford
or is is google evil because it will
sell you mind conf
is amazon evil because it will sell you
mind conf if you find out that mineconf
rests on somebody's bookshelf do you
have any idea what it means
if you find out that a scholar used the
n-word
should that person lose their job come
on
grow the hell up i guess our
responsibility to lead by example on
that
because you have to acknowledge that the
fact like the
the current have somebody on your
podcast who you're worried about
and but but yeah but do it in a
principled fashion i mean in other words
i'm not here to whitewash
yeah everything on the other hand
if somebody makes you know some
allegations
i don't know that i'm obligated to treat
every set of allegations as if
now how do you defend yourself against
no allegations are so cheap to make at
this moment
well my sort of my standard i don't know
maybe you could speak to it is
i don't care like in the case of alex
jones for example i don't
i'm willing to have a conversation with
alex jones and people like him
if i know he's not going to try to
manipulate me
assume that he is going to try to
manipulate you i can't then then we're
not going to be two humans
okay but lex i want you to think well of
me i put on a jacket i don't usually
wear
a jacket okay um thank you eric
all right i'm trying to manipulate you
there's an entire
field no there's an entire field that
says that
speech may be best thought of as an
attempt to manipulate
each other this is too simplistic
everything that we keep talking through
yes you know better than this i disagree
i i think
i think there's ways there's
of course it's a gray area but there is
a threshold
where your intent with which you come to
a meeting to an
interaction is one that is not
one that's grounded in like a respect
for a common humanity like a love for
each other as deeply messy
if somebody is doing really bad stuff i
expect you to try to keep them from
doing really bad stuff
but you know just keep in mind that when
i was a
younger man i saw an amazing
anti-pornography document documentary
and it was called rate it x and i don't
know where it went
but the conceit of it was we're going to
get some pornographers
in front of a camera because they want
to talk and we're going to ask them
about what they do for a living
and why it's okay
no commentary
okay you could potentially if you really
think alex jones is the worst and
again i'm not intimately familiar with
him
you could decide to
um let him talk
now i have decided not to do that with
particular people
you know i've spoken to stefan molyneux
stefan molyneux makes many
good points and makes many bad points
and he makes many good points in bad
ways
and i worry about it and i don't feel
that it's it's not my obligation to make
sure that
stefan molyneux has a voice on the
portal
but i did stand up and say i didn't want
him banned from social media
and i do think that a lot of the people
who are being banned from social media
were worried that they're right rather
than that they're wrong
i certainly don't really think that i'm
worried
in some sense that some of the really
wrong people are wrong but you know if
you look at for example curtis yarvin
there's a tremendous amount of interest
is eric gonna speak to curtis jarvin
curtis yarman says many interesting
things
and he says many horrible stupid things
very provocative
and i don't i haven't even i haven't
invited him onto the portal
but i haven't said i will never invite
him on to the portal
we are all in a difficult position
that's what i'm saying
you're making it kind of i think it's a
much more difficult task
that and burden will carry as people who
have conversations because
courtesy aaron is a good example how
much
work do i have to put in reading
curtis's work to really
understand about the problem of curtis
jarvin yes because i think it's probably
illustrative there's this big question
is why does somebody who says such
stupid ass things listened to by so many
people
very smart people people who are part of
our daily lives discuss
curtis yarvin in hush tones now let's
see a question
my belief is that curtis yarvin has made
a
number of very interesting provocative
points
and they associate curtis yarvin as the
person who has made these points
and they treat the completely asinine
stuff that he says that's super
dangerous
as well that's curtis
right right they give him the credit for
he he's he's
kind of like sorry to use the term first
principles deep thinker about
in some way in some space about the
world
yeah but as a result we don't actually
know
why curtis yarvin is knocking around
so many silicon valley luminaries lives
what's see see you said that he said a
lot of sni stupid stuff and that's the
sense i got from a few things i've read
not just about it this is not just like
wikipedia stuff
is he he's a little like i've said
before
he seems to be careless i don't think
he's care
no no it's like jim watson jim watson
wants to say very provocative things in
order to prove that he's free
it's not question of careless he enjoys
yeah the freedom
to say these things yeah and the key
point is is that there's i expect
something more of curtis
i expect that if somebody is insightful
about all sorts of things
up to that point that they're going to
have enough care now i for example make
this point repeatedly that vaccines are
not 100
safe most people who have an idea that
anybody is an anti-vaxxer should be
silenced
are in a position where they they they
probably don't say vaccines are 100 say
but
you keep finding that statement over and
over again like believe all women
vaccines are 100 safe climate science is
settled science
whatever this mountain bailey is where
you make extraordinarily
vapid blanket claims and then you
retreat into something well defund the
pull you know we don't want
no more police actually just means we
want the police to not take on mental
health duties
we've come up with an incredibly
disingenuous society
and what i'm claiming is is that i might
talk to curtis yarvin
but i have really very little interest
to talk to a guy
who seems to be kind of giddy about who
makes good slaves and who makes bad
slaves
it's like why do i want to do that on
the portal
one first of all because just as you
said
that's not curtis's main thing he has a
lot of ideas and
uh what i've read of him which is not a
huge amount
is there's he's very thoughtful about
the way this world
works and on top of that he's an
important historical figure
in the birth and the development of the
alt-right or
what would be called our right the new
reaction yeah and there's
so he's just an important intellectual
and so it makes sense to talk to him the
question is
how much work do you put in well this is
the issue of fugu
i'm not a chef that necessarily can
serve that
fugu so you have you have a puffer fish
you can eat the puffer fish you can you
can get a kind of a tingly sensation on
your tongue
if you get a little bit of the poison
organ but my point is i don't know how
to serve
curtis yarvin yeah so that in fact i'm
not worried
about what happens and i believe that if
somebody else
was a student of the new reactionary
movement
that person might be in a better
position to host curtis yarwin
so somebody that's a really good example
somebody i think you've spoken with
uh that's an intermediary that's a
powerful one is michael malus and he's
spoken with curtis jarvin
and uh michael wrote a book about by the
way michael somewhat changed my mind
about michael malus
i'm glad he did i think i i would call
him
a friend and i think he's a underneath
it all
a really kind human being and i think
your skepticism about him was initially
from a surface level of what did you
call him hyenas
the trolls and so on i'm not happy about
his
it's been so long since i've seen good
trolls
yes so he
he needs a higher quality of trolling
but he aspires to that
i mean it you know disagree or not
i really enjoy how much care
he puts into the work he does like on
north korea and
study of the world and how much
privately
but also in public love he has for
people
especially those who are powerless yeah
just like genuine
admiration for them uh for but yeah
i think curtis actually does too i don't
know
i mean you have to appreciate the first
time i met curtis he introduced to me
says
i'm the most right-wing person you've
ever met i was just like
well this is a conversation that's
already over it's theatrical
in a way that's not conducted to
actually having a real well it just
actually
turned me so it turned me off because it
was like
you need to be the most right-wing
person and so it's like i'm a troll i'm
a troll
yeah okay why are we doing this yeah but
what i'm trying to get is different
i'm trying to say that michael malus is
a friend of yours if you found out
something terrible
you should be a friend you should still
continue to be his friend
and you know and michael's case is very
likely that we'll find
out something curtis is an acquaintance
of mine because he hangs around with
some people that i know
i did not get it i've started to
understand why the people in my life
some of them are curtis yarvin fans many
of them disregard the stupid stuff
but my feeling is is that too much
poison organ not enough fish
i don't know how to serve that too
intermingled i'm not your chef
speaking for defending your friends
staying with your friends
and uh bringing the old band uh together
again you uh coined the term idw
intellectual dark web
uh i like it it's it represents a
certain group of
people that are struggling with the
that are almost like a challenge
the norms of social and political
discourse
from all different angles right what do
you think is the state of the idw what
do you think is its future
is it still a useful
well it never exists is it a protocol is
it a collection of people featured in an
article
what i learned very clearly is that
there's a tremendous desire in the
internet
age to pin people down what do you say
who's in it what are the criterion
it's like i understand you want to play
the demarcation game and you want to
make everything that is demarcated
instantly null and void no thank you so
i resisted saying who was in it i
resisted saying what it was
i resisted saying that barry weiss's
article was the definitive thing
you know they chose a ridiculous concept
for the photographs that we couldn't get
out of
i did not want those photographs taken
and they decided that the pulitzer
prize-winning photographer needed to
take them all at twilight
you know i don't know some such thing i
didn't even necessarily want to do the
article
um barry convinced me that it was the
right thing to do
undoubtedly barry was right i was wrong
but
the key point is nothing can grow in
this environment
there's a reason we're not building it
does not appear
that we found a way to grow anything
organic and good and decent that we need
right now and that's kind of the key
issue who's the we do you mean us as a
society those of us who wish to have
a future for our great grandchildren
let's let's let's take the subset of
people who are worried
about things long after their demise
but do you think it's useful to have a
term like the idw to capture some
set of people some set of ideas
or maybe principles that capture what i
think the idw
okay you can say it's not supposed to
mean it doesn't exist it doesn't mean
anything
but to the public to me okay i'll just
speak to me
it represented something yeah i i it uh
represented i think i just said this to
you
it's my in my first attempt
to interview the great eric weinstein uh
i said that
uh i spoke this about you but iew in
general is trying to point out the
elephant in the room
or that the emperor has no clothes the
set of people that do that in their own
way
if there are multiple elephants in the
room yes the point is is that the idw
was more interested in seeing the
totality of elephants and trying to
figure out
how do we move forward as opposed to
saying i can spot the other guy's
elephant in the room but i can't see my
own
right and you know in large measure we
didn't represent
an institutional base and therefore it
wasn't
maximally important that we look at our
own hypocrisy because
we weren't on the institutional spectrum
this is where friendship comes into play
with the different figures that
are loosely associated with idw is you
were somehow
uh responsible for
you know the the exactly thing that you
said did you hear what
i don't know i forgive you dame oh who
what sam harris said about
idw yeah that that kind of thing is
why chuckled lovingly or chuckled like
or i was angry at some people who had
said things that caused sam to say what
sam said about
turning his imaginary club membership
into the idw
people said very silly things and
you know i think that there is just this
confusion that
um integrity means calling out your
friends in
in front of the world right and you know
i've been pretty clear about this uh i
try to choose my friends carefully
and if you would like to recuse me
because i'm not a source of reliable
information
people that i know and love the most um
maybe that's reasonable for you maybe
you prefer somebody who was willing to
throw a friend
under the bus at the first sign of
trouble by all means
uh exit my feed you don't have to
subscribe to me if that's
if that's your concept of integrity
you're barking up the wrong tree what i
will say is that i knew these people
well enough to know that they're all
flawed
thank you for the call back and uh but
the issue is
that um i love people who are flawed
and i love people who have to earn a
living
even if you call them a grifter and i
love people who
uh you know like the fact that donald
trump didn't get us into new wars even
if you call
them alt-right i love the fact that
some people believe in structural
oppression and want to fight it even if
they're not woke because they don't
believe that structural oppression is
hiding everywhere
i care and love different people in
different ways and i just
i think that you know the overarching
thing lacks that we're not getting at is
that
we were sold a bill of goods that you
can go through life
like an eliza program with
pre-programmed
responses well it's what about ism
it's both scientism it's all right
it's the looney left it's campus madness
you know it's like
okay why don't you just empty the entire
goddamn
magazine all of those
pre-recorded snips
now that you've done all of that now we
can have a conversation
your son put it really well which is we
should in all things resist labels
but we can't deal without labels we have
to generalize
but we also have to keep in mind that
just the way in science you deal with an
effective theory that isn't a
fundamental one
in science most of our theories we
consider to be effective theories
if i generalize about about europe
about women about
you know christians those things
have to be understood to mean something
and not to have their
definitions extend so broadly that they
mean
nothing at all nor um
that they're so rigid that their claims
that clearly won't bear scrutiny
lex what do you really want to talk
about that's my always my question to
you
that always gets me that's a good thing
maybe you are the therapist
but like you and i could talk about
anything people love
up until now at least people have loved
listening to the two of us in
conversation
and my feeling is is that we're not
talking about neural nets
we're not talking about geometric unity
and we're not talking about where
distributed computing might go
and i don't think that we're really
focused on
some of the most exciting things we
could do to transform education we're
still caught
in this world of other people that we
don't belong
i don't belong in the world as it's been
created i'm trying to build a new world
and i'm astounded
that the people with the independent
means to help build that world are so
demotivated
that they don't want to build new
structures
and the people who do want to build new
structures seem to be wild-eyed
while i do what do you mean by wild eyed
they're not they're not i guarantee you
that i will get some message in my dms
it says hey eric
you know i'm a third year chemistry
student
at uh you know south dakota state and
i've got a great idea i just need
funding i want to build
they don't have the means so the people
who have the means
or the sophistication you know it's like
you're looking for somebody
who's proven themselves a few times to
say you know i've got four billion
dollars behind me
that's soft circled i want to figure out
what a new university would be
and what it would take to protect
academic freedom and who we would hire
and what
what are the different characteristics
because i can clearly see that
everything following the current model
is falling apart
nobody in my understanding is saying
that
nobody is saying um
let's take that which is functioning
independently
and make it less vulnerable let's boost
those
those signals and a critical component
as money you think
it's not only that but it's also a kind
of these people
are mobbed up hands off let's imagine
for the moment
that sunder pichai jack dorsey and mark
zuckerberg
founded a university come
social media entity
and they said this is the purpose of
this is to make sure that academic
freedom will not perish from this earth
because it's necessary to keep us from
all going crazy
we are going to lock ourselves out we've
come up with this
governance system and the idea is is
that these people will be
assigned the difficult task of making
sure that society doesn't go crazy in
any particular direction that we have a
fact-based reality-based
feasibility-based understanding we can
try to figure out where our real
opportunities are
so it feels like everybody with a posi
with the ability to do something like
that
and with the with the brains and
experience and the resources
would rather sit in the current system
and hope to figure out where they can
flee to if the whole thing comes apart
well yeah and maybe to push back in a
little bit i i agree with you but
you know it feels like there some people
are trying that so for example google
purchased deep mind uh deepmind is a
company that kind of represents
a lot of radical ideas they're they've
become acceptable actually
agi artificial general intelligence used
to be
really radical of a thing to talk about
and deepmind and openai are two places
which has made it more acceptable i know
you can now start to criticize well
they're really
now that it's become acceptable they're
not taking the further step of being
more radical but
you know that was an attempt by google
to say
uh that let's let's try some wild stuff
sort of like boston dynamics sort of
like boston dynamics
boston dynamics is a really good example
of uh
trying radical ideas for
perhaps no purpose whatsoever except to
try to try
out their ideas the idea is that
innovation
is like dessert you can have dessert
after you solve
the problem of the main course and the
main course is a bunch of insoluble
problems
so that is we can get into innovation
sure once we be
once we perfect ourselves and you're
you're saying that we need to make
innovation
the the main meal well i'm saying that
there really is
structural oppression i mean if you
train
uh a a
deep learning system on exclusively
white faces it's going to get confused
yeah so let's not disagree that there
are real issues around this
in fact that's an issue of innovation
and data
your data should be responsive on the
other hand
there are things we can't do anything
about that are actually
you know fundamental and um
those things may have to do with the
fact that uh you know some of us
uh taste cilantro as soap and some of us
don't
like there are differences between
people and some of them are in the
hardware some of them are in the
firmware some of them are in the
software
that is the human mind and
this completely simplistic idea that
every failure
of of an organization
to promote each person who has
particular intersexual characteristics
we cannot hold progress hostage to that
and you've talked about perhaps we'll
save this for another time because it's
such a fascinating conversation we
talked about
this with uh glenn beck is the whole
stagnation of growth and all that kind
of stuff your idea is that
in as much as the current situation
is a kind of ponzi scheme the current
situation in the united states
is a kind of ponzi scheme built on the
promise of
constant unending innovation
we need uh we need to
fund the true innovators and
uh encourage them and empower them
and sort of culturally say that this is
what this country is about
is let's put it this way the brilliant
minds we're gonna kill each other
if we don't grow growth is like an
immune system
and you always have pathogens present
but if you don't have growth present you
can't fight the pathogens in your
society
and right now the pathogens are
spreading everywhere
so if we don't get growth into our
system fairly quickly
we are in really seriously bad shape
so it's very important that if i had a
horrible person who was capable of
building something that would give us
all
a certain amount of what i've called
financial beta to some new technology
where we all
benefit let's say quantum computing
comes in and everybody
the dry cleaner has a quantum computing
angle right yes
okay that's necessary to keep this
system that we built
going we can try to redesign the system
but our system expects growth and we've
started
starved it for growth and the madness
that we're seeing is the failure of
our immune system to be able to handle
the pathogens that have always been
present
so people you know can say well this was
always there yes it was what's changed
was your immune system
we have got to make sure that
one we understand why diversity is
potentially really important
we have mined certain communities to
death you and i are ashkenazi jews
everyone knows that ashkenazi jews are
good at technical stuff
we know that the chinese are good at
technical stuff the indians have many
people who are good at technical stuff
as
the japanese i also believe
that we have communities where if you
think about the pareto
idea of diminishing returns if you've
never mined a community
many of the people you're going to get
at the beginning are going to be amazing
because that community it's like did you
drill for more oil in texas texas is
pretty
thoroughly picked over do you find some
place that's you know
completely insane maybe there's oil
there who knows
in particular i would like to displace
our reliance
on our military competitors in asia in
our scientific laboratories
with women with african americans with
latinos
people who are in different categories
than we have traditionally sourced and i
would like to get them the money
that the market would normally give
these fields were we not using visas in
place of payment
right now
i particular i have crazy idea which is
that i play
you you and i both play music and i find
the analytic work that i do when i'm
trying to figure out chord progressions
and symmetries and tritones all these
sorts of things to be very similar to
the work that i do when i do physics or
math
i believe that one of the things that is
true is
that the analytic contributions of
african americans
to music are probably fungible to
science
i don't know that that's true it's true
i haven't done
controlled research but i believe it is
very important to let the people's
republic of china
know that they are not staffing our
laboratories anymore
and that we need to look to our own
people and in particular
we are going to get a huge benefit from
making sure that women
black americans latinos are in a
position
to take over some of these things
because many of these communities have
been
underutilized now i don't know if that's
an insane idea
i want to hear somebody tell me why it's
an insane idea
but i believe that part of what we need
to do is we need to recognize that there
is there are
security issues there are geopolitical
issues with the funding of science
and that what we've done is we've
starved our world for innovation and if
we don't get
back to the business of innovation we
should be doing diversity and inclusion
out of greed rather than guilt
now part of the problem with this is
that a lot of the energy
in behind diversity and inclusion is
based on guilt
and accusation yeah and what i want
is i want to kick ass and my hope is is
that diminishing returns
favors mining the communities that have
not been traditionally mined
in order to extract um
output from those communities unless
there's a flaw in that plan if there's a
flaw somebody needs to tell me if there
isn't a flaw
we need to get greedy about innovation
rather than guilty about innovation
that's really brilliantly put my biggest
problem with what i see is
it exactly speaks to that and in the
discussion is diversity
it's used when it's grounded in guilt
it's then
used as a hammer to shame people that
don't care about diversity enough
that okay
so my point is i'm excited about the
idea of jimi hendrix doing quantum field
theory
i'm excited about the idea of of uh art
tatum trying to figure out
uh what the
neural nets figured out about protein
folding i have some idea of the level of
intellect
of people who have not found their way
into stem subjects
in incredibly technically demanding
areas and
if there's a flaw in that theory i want
somebody to present the flaw
but right now my belief is is that
these things are merit-based and if you
really believe in structural oppression
you do not want an affirmative action
program you want to make sure that
people have huge amounts of resources to
get themselves into position
i want to push out i just tried this on
this clubhouse application
i want to push out klein bottles as a
secret sign
inside of rap videos in hip-hop right i
want people to have an idea that there's
an amazing world and i want to get the
people
who hopefully i'm trying to lure into
science and engineering
i want to get them paid i don't want
them as the cheap substitutes for the
fleeing
white males who have learned that they
can't make any money in science and
engineering
yeah so the problem is is that we need
we need to take over the ship lex
and it doesn't need to be you and me
because quite honestly i have no desire
to administer i don't want to be the
chief executive officer of anything what
i do want
is i want the baby boomers who've made
this mess and can't see
it to be gone they they had almost all
of our universities
and i want fresh blood fresh resources
i want academic freedom and i want greed
for our country and for the future to
determine diversity inclusion as opposed
to shame and guilt which is destroying
our fabric
that's as good of a diversity statement
as i've ever heard
this is a u-turn but somebody commented
on the tweet you sent that as one of the
top comments that i definitely have to
ask you about cryptocurrency
so it's a u-turn but not really
okay since you're an economist since
you're deep not an economist
you i mean i i pretend to be an
economist hoping that the economists
will
take issue that i'm not an economist so
that i can advance
gauge theoretic and field theoretic
economics which the economics profession
has failed to acknowledge was a major
innovation
that happened approximately 25 years ago
i don't think that economists
understand what a price index is that
measures inflation nor do i think
economists understand
what a growth index or a product
a quantity index is that measures gdp
i think that they don't even understand
the basics
of price and quantity index construction
and therefore
they can't possibly review
field theoretic economics they can't
review gauge theoretic economics
they're intellectually not in a position
to manage their own field
you talked about there's a stagnation
and growth currently
i looked at from my microeconomics
macroeconomics and college perspective
gdp doesn't seem to capture the
productivity
the full the spectrum of what i think is
as a functioning successful society what
do you think is broken about gdp
what does it need to include uh these
indices
like let me let me explain what they
don't understand to begin with sure
imagine that all prices
and all quantities uh of output
are the same at the end of the year as
they are at the beginning
and you ask what happened during that
year was there inflation
they meandered over the course of the
year but miraculously they all came
back to exactly their values the amount
produced at the end of the year is the
same as at the beginning in every single
quantity
typically the claim would be that the
price index should be 1.0
and that the quantity index should be
1.0 that's
clearly wrong why
well it's much easier to see
with it speaks to a fundamental
confusion that economists have they
don't understand that the economy is
curved and not flat
in a curved economy everything should be
path dependence but they
view path dependence as a problem
because they are effectively the flat
earth society
of market analysis they don't understand
that what they've called
and they've actually called it the
cycling problem is exactly what they
need to understand to advance their
field
so i'll give you a very simple example
okay let's imagine that we have bob and
carol
in one hedge fund and ted and alice in
another
in both cases the females that is
alice and carol are the chief investment
officers
and bob and ted are the chief marketing
officers in
charge of trying to get money into the
fund and trying to get people not
um to in fact
remove their their money from the funds
okay
if you in fact had uh
bob and caroline's head in alice and
both hedge funds
were invested in assets whose prices
came back to the same levels and whose
exposures were in the same quantities
and you wanted to compensate these two
hedge funds would you compensate them
the same necessarily
what if for example
carol was killing it in terms of
investments every time she bought
some sort of security the price of that
security went up
okay but bob was the worst marketing
officer and as chief marketing officer
there were tons of redemptions because
bob was constantly drunk
bob was making off-color comments now
as a result at the end of the year the
fund hasn't grown in size
because even though carol was crushing
it in terms of the investments
bob was screwing up everything be and
the redemptions were legendary
so people were making money and still
pulling it out of the fund
in the other fund
alice can't seem to buy a base hit every
time she gets into a security the thing
plummets
but ted's amazing marketing skills
allowed
the fund to get all sorts of new
subscriptions and halted the redemptions
as people
hoped that the fund would get its act
together
okay price indices
should be how carol
and alice are compensated
and quantity indices should be how
um bob and ted are compensated
so even though both funds had closed
loops that come back to the original
states
what happened during the period that
they were active
tells you how people are supposed to be
compensated
now we know that whatever the increase
in the price indus
index is is compensated by a decrease
in the quantity index or conversely
because prices and quantities return to
their original values
you could have another fund where
nothing much happened there were no
redemptions no subscriptions
prices the fund remained in cash the
whole time so in that third fund
you know let's call that tristan is
older right
that fund should have no bonuses paid
because nobody did anything but nobody
should be fired either
now the fact that the economists don't
even understand that this is what their
price and quantity indices
were intended to do that they don't
understand that you can actually give
what would be called
ordinal agents the freedom to change
their preferences
and still have something defined as a
conus cost of living adjustment they
don't even understand the mathematics of
their field
so the indices need to be able to
capture some kind of dynamics
uh that we have had indices that capture
these dynamics
due to the work of francois division
since 1925
but the economists have not even
understood what divisius index truly
represented what do you miss with
uh with uh such crude indices then
well you miss the fact that you're
supposed to have a field theoretic
subject
the representative consumer should
actually be a probability distribution
on the space of all possible consumers
weighted by the probability of getting
any particular pull from the
distribution
we should not have a single gauge of
inflation like
what is that in 1973 dollars any more
than you should be able to say
it was 59 degrees fahrenheit on earth
yesterday
so when we get to the cryptocurrency
what i'm going to say
is is that because we didn't found
economic theory on the proper marginal
revolution because we missed the major
opportunity which is is that
the differential calculus of markets is
gage theory
it's not ordinary uh
differential calculus we found that out
in in finance that it was stochastic
differential calculus
we have the wrong version of the
differential calculus underneath
all of modern economic theory and part
of what i've been pushing for in
cryptocurrencies
is the idea that we should be
understanding that gold
is a gauge theory just as modern
economic theory is supposed to be a
gauge theory
and that we should be looking to
liberate cryptocurrencies
and more importantly distributed
computing
from the problem of this unwanted global
aspect which is the blockchain the thing
that is most celebrated
in some sense about bitcoin is in fact
the reason that i'm least enthusiastic
about it i'm
hugely enthusiastic about what satoshi
did but it's an intermediate step
towards trying to figure out what should
digital gold
actually be if physical gold
is a collection of uh up quarks and down
quarks in the form of protons and
neutrons
held together the quarks by gluons with
electrons orbiting it held together by
photons with the occasional
weak interaction beta decay all of those
are gauge theories
so gold is actually coming from gage
theory
and markets are coming from gauge theory
and the opportunity
to do locally enforced conservation laws
which effectively is what a bitcoin
transaction is
should theoretically be founded on a
different principle that is not the
blockchain
it should be a gauge theoretic concept
in which
effectively the tokens are excitations
on a network of computer nodes
and the fact that let's imagine that
this is some
token by moving it from
my custodianship to your custodianship
effectively i
pushed that glass as a gauge theory
towards your region of the table
we should be recognizing that gage
theory is the correct
differential calculus for the 21st
century in fact it should have been
there in the 20th century
you're saying it captures these
individual individual dynamics
richer why should my giving you a token
have to be
why should we alert the global community
in this token that that occurred you can
talk about side chains you can talk
about any means of doing this
but effectively we have a problem which
is if i think about this differently
yeah i have a glass that is extant
you have a glass that is abstinent we're
supposed to call
the constructor method on your glass at
the same moment we call the destructor
method on my glass in order to have a
conservation principle
it would be far more efficient to do
this with the one
series system that is known never to
throw an exception which is nature
and nature has chosen gauge theory and
geometry for her underlying language
we now know due to work of pia milani at
harvard
in economics in the mid-1990s which i
was her co-author on
but i i wish to promote her as as well
as this being my idea
we know that modern economic theory is a
naturally occurring gauge theory
and the failure of that community to
acknowledge that that work occurred
and that it was put down for reasons
that make no analytic sense
is important in particular due to the
relatively new innovation of distributed
computing
and satoshi's brainchild so you're
thinking we need to have the mathematics
that captures
that enforces cryptocurrency as a
distributed system as opposed to a
centralized one where the blockchain
says that crypto should be uh
centralized the abundance economy
much discussed in silicon valley or
what's left of it
is actually a huge threat to the planet
because what it really is is that it is
what marc andreessen is called software
eating the world
and what that means is that you're going
to push things from being private goods
and services into public goods and
services and public goods and services
cannot have price and value tied
together
ergo people will produce things of
incredible value
to to the world that they cannot command
a price and they will not be able to
capture
the value that they have created or a
significant enough fraction of it
the abundance economy is a disaster it
will
lead to a reduction in human freedom the
great innovation of satoshi
is locally enforced or semi-locally
enforced
conservation laws where the idea is just
as gold as heart you know why is gold
hard
to create or destroy it's because it's
created not only in stars but in violent
events involving stars like supernova
collisions
when gold is created and we transact
we're using conservation laws the
physics determines
the custodianship whatever it is that i
don't have you now have
and conversely in such a situation
we should be looking for the abstraction
that most closely matches the physical
world because the physical world is
known not to throw an exception
the blockchain is a vulnerability the
idea that the 51 percent problem isn't
solved
that you could have crazy race
conditions all of these things we know
that they're solved
inside of gage theory somehow
so the important thing is to recognize
that one of the greatest
intellectual feats ever in the history
of economic theory
took place already and was essentially
instantly buried
and i will stand by those comments
satoshi wherever you are
i probably know you are you satoshi no
no no i don't have that kind of ability
i really don't
i do other things speaking of satoshi
engaged theory
you've mentioned to brian keating
that you may be releasing a geometric
community paper
this year or some other form of
additional material
in the topic uh what is your thinking
around this
what's the process you're going through
now well i was very
trying this i i used april 1st to try to
start a tradition
which i hope to use to liberate mankind
the tradition is that at least one day a
year
you should be able to say heretical
things
and not have jack dorsey boot you off or
mark zuckerberg
your provost shouldn't call you up and
say what did you say
we need at some level to have a jubilee
from
centralized control and so my
my hope is that you know what a
tradition is in america
something a baby boomer did twice
impeachment that's very funny
anyway um so when i'm i'm not a baby
boomer but as an exer
i've thought about whether or not april
first would be a good date
on which to release a printed version of
what i already said in lecture form
because i think it's hysterically funny
that the physics community claims
that it can't decode video a lecture
yeah i
it must be paper and you know what there
will be a steady stream of new
complaints
up until the point that they fit it into
a narrative that they like
um yeah i'm thinking about april 1st uh
as a date in which to release a document
and it won't be perfectly complete but
it'll be very complete
and then they'll try to say it's wrong
or
you already did it or no that was dumb
but what we just did on top of it is
brilliant
or it doesn't match experiment or who
knows what they'll go through all of
their usual nonsense
it's time to go is there still puzzles
in your own mind
that need to be figured out for you to
try to put it on paper i mean
those are different mediums right it was
a great question
i did not count on something that turns
out to be important
when you work on your own outside of the
system for a long time
you probably don't think you're going to
be doing this as a 55 year old
man and i have been so long outside of
math and physics departments and i've
been occupied with so many other things
as you can see
that the old idea that i had was if i
always did it in little pieces
then i was always safe because it
wouldn't be stealable
and so now those pieces never got
assembled
completely in essence i have all the
pieces
and i can fit them together
but there's probably a small amount of
glue code
like there are a few algebraic things
i've forgotten how to do i may or may
not figure them out between now and
april 1st
but it's pretty complete but that's the
puzzle you're kind of uh
struggling to now figure out to get it
all on
the glue together i can't tell you
whether the theory is correct
or incorrect but like you know for
example there's what's the exact form of
the super symmetry algebra or
how what's the rule for passing a minus
sign through a particular operator
and all of that stuff got a lot more
difficult because i didn't
i didn't do it ever look you know it's a
little bit like
uh if you're you know if you're a
violinist and you don't touch your
violin
regularly for 15 years you come back to
it you pretty much know the pieces sort
of but there's lots of stuff that's
missing your tone is off and that kind
of stuff
i would say i've got i'll get the ship
to the harbor and it'll
require a tugboat probably to get it in
and if the tugboat doesn't show up then
i'll pilot the
thing right into the dock myself but
it's not a big deal i think that
it is essentially complete
psychologically
just as a human being this is uh i
remember
perhaps by accident but maybe there's no
accidents in the universe
i was tuned in i don't remember where on
april 1st
yeah to you uh oh i think i need discord
yeah uh kind of thinking about thinking
through this release i mean it wasn't
like
uh it wasn't obvious that you were going
to do it you were thinking through it
and i remember there was
intellectual personal psychological
struggle with this
yeah right well because i did i thought
it was dangerous if this
turns out to be right i don't know what
it unlocks
i'm if it's wrong i think i
understand where we are if it's wrong
it'll be the first
fool's gold that really looks like a
theory of everything
it'll be the iron pyrites of physics and
we haven't even had fool's gold in my
opinion yet
got it so what is your intuition why
this
looks right to you like why it feels
like
it would be if if wrong i can say it
very simply
it's way smarter than i am can you break
that apart a little more
like every time you poke at it it's
giving you intuitions that follow with
the
the currently known physics well let's
put it in computer science terms
yes please okay there's a concept of
technical debt that computer scientists
struggle with as you commit crimes you
have to pay those crimes back at a later
date
in general most of the problem with
physical theories is that
as you try to do something that matches
reality you usually have to go into some
structure
that gets you farther away and your hope
is is that you're going to be able to
pay back the technical debt and
in general these will wind up as check
hiding schemes
or like you're funding a startup and
they're too many pivots
right so you keep adding epicycles in
order to
to cover things that have gone wrong
my belief is is that
this thing represents something like a
summit
to me and i'm very proud of having found
a route up this summit
but the route is what's due to me the
summit can't possibly
be due to me you know
like edmund hillary and tenzing norgay
did not create mount everest they know
that they didn't create math
they figured out a way up
you got to tell me what uh mon everest
is in this metaphor
relative and also connected to the
technical debt so technical debt is an
is a negative thing that it's kind of
you you'll eventually have to pay it
are you saying in the in the ascent that
you're seeing
now the theory is you do not have much
technical debt well that's right i think
that what happens is that early on
what i would say is i believe now
that the physics community has said
many things incorrectly about the
current
state of the universe they're not wildly
off which is why
like for example the claim is that there
are three generations of matter
i do not believe that there are three
generations matter i believe that there
are two generations of matter and there
is a third
collection that looks like a generation
of matter
as the first two only at low energy
okay well that's not a frequent claim
people imagine that there are three or
more generations of matter
i would claim that that's false people
claim that the matter is chiral that is
it knows it's left from its right
i would claim that the chirality is not
fundamental but it is emergent
we could keep going at all these sorts
of things people think that
space time is the fundamental geomatic
geometrical construct
i do not agree i think it's something
that i've termed the observers
all of these different things
represent a series of
over-interpretations
of the world that preclude progress
so you you gave i think you gave uh some
credit to string theory
as uh string theory i think quantum
gravity if i remember correctly
as as like getting close to the
fool's uh gold well i said that garrett
lisey
apparently phenomenologically gets
a lot of things right he gets he's got a
reason for chirality
a reason for uniqueness using e8 in fact
e8 uses something called vial fermions
which are chiral
he has a way of getting geometry
to get riemann's geometry underneath
general relativity to play with
aerosman's geniometry which is
underneath the standard model using
something called cartan connections that
are out of favor
he's figured out something involving
super connections
to make sure that the fermion the matter
in the system isn't quantized
the same way as the bosons were which is
a problem in his old theory
he's got something about three
generations for triality he's got a lot
of phenomenological hits
i don't think garrett's theory works it
also has a very simple lagranges
basically using the yang mills
norm squared the same thing you would
use as a as a cost function
uh if you were doing neural nets okay
the string theorists have a different
selling point which is is that they may
have gotten a renormalizable theory of
gravity
if quantum gravity was what we were
meant to do
and they've done some stuff with black
holes that they can get some solutions
correct and then they have lots of
agreements with where they show
mathematical
truths that mathematicians didn't even
know
i'm very underwhelmed by string theory
based on how many people have worked on
it
and how little is supporting the claims
to it being a theory of everything
but those are the two that i take
quite seriously i don't yet take
wolfram's
quite seriously because if he really
finds one of these
cellular automatons that are really
distinct and generative
it'll be amazing but he's looking for
such a thing i don't think he's
found anything tegmark i view as a
philosopher
who is somehow taking credit for
platonism which
i don't see any reason for fighting with
max because i like max but
if it ever comes time i'm putting a
post-it note that i'm not positive the
mathematical universe hypothesis
is really anything new um and in general
uh loop quantum gravity really i think
grew out of some hopes that the general
relativistic community had for
that they would be able to do particle
theory and i don't think that they've
shown
any particle theoretic realism so
essentially
here's what i really think lex
i think we didn't understand how big the
difference between
an effective theory and a theory of
everything is conceptually
maybe it's not mathematically that
different but conceptually
trying to figure out what a theory of
every how does the universe and i've
compared it to escher's drawing hands
how do two hands draw themselves into
existence
that's the puzzle that i think has just
been wanting and i i'll be honest i'm
really surprised
that the theoretical physics community
didn't even get up on their high horse
and say this is
the most stupid nonsense imaginable
because clearly i'm i always say i'm not
a physicist
so i'm just a i'm i'm i'm an amateur
with a heart as big as all outdoors
so in your journey of releasing this and
i'm sure that
further maybe uh it will be another
american tradition on april 1st
that will continue for years uh
in my uh there's sort of
uh crumbs along the way that i'm hoping
to uh collect in my naive view of things
of the beauty that
in your geometric view of the universe
so uh one question
i'd like to ask is um
if you were to challenge me to visualize
something beautiful
something important about geometric
community in my struggle to
appreciate some of its beauty from the
outsider's perspective
what would that be thing be interesting
question
perhaps we can both have a journey
towards april first
take a look at that
some kind of a scrunchie that i picked
up on melrose
not melrose montana in santa monica
now you'll notice that all of those
discs
rotate independently yes
if you rotate groups of those in a way
that is continuous but not uniform
everywhere what you're doing is the
so-called gauge
transformation on the torus seen as a u1
bundle
over a u1 space time so
the concept of space-time here in a very
simplified case isn't four-dimensional
but it's one-dimensional it's just a
circle
and there's a circle above every point
in the circle represented by those
little discs
imagine if you will that
we took a rubber band
and placed it around here and decided
that that was a function
from the circle into this circle that is
representing a y-axis that's wrapped
around itself
well you would have an idea of what it
means for a function to be constant
if it just went all around the outside
but what happens if i
turn this a little bit then the function
would be mostly constant it would have a
little place where it dipped
and it went back it turns out that you
can
transform that function and transform
the derivative
that says that function is equal to zero
when i take its derivative
at the same time that's what a gauge
transformation is amazing to me
that we don't have a simple video
visualizing things that i've already
had built and that i can clearly
demonstrate
when you do that taurus who's the code
of the taurus is itself
generating yeah this is a u1 principle
bundle
and the world needs to know what a gauge
theory is not by analogy
not with lawrence krauss saying it's
like a checkerboard if you change some
of the colors this way not saying
you know that it it's it's a
local symmetry involving it's none of
those things it's a theory of
differential calculus where the
functions
and the derivatives are both subject to
a particular kind of change
so that if a function was constant under
one derivative
then the new function is constant under
the new derivative
transformed in the same fashion and
would you put that under the category of
just gauge transformations
yes that would be gauge transformations
applied to sections
and connections where connections are
the derivatives in the theory
this is easily explained it is
pathological that the community of
people who understand what i'm saying
have never bothered
to do this in a clear fashion for the
general public you and i could visualize
this
overnight this is not hard
the public needs to know in some sense
that let's say quantum electrodynamics
the theory of photons and electrons more
or less electrons are functions
and photons are derivatives now there's
some
you can object in some ways but
basically a gauge theory
is the way in which you can translate uh
a shift in the definition of the
functions and the shift
of the definition of the derivatives so
that the underlying physics is not
harmed
or changed so you have to do both at the
same time
now you and i can visualize that so if
what you wanted to do
rather than going directly to geometric
unity is that i could sit down with you
and i could say here are the various
components of geometric unity
and if the public needs a visualization
in order to play along
we've got a little over two months and
i'd be happy to work with you
i love that as a challenge and i'll take
it on and i hope we do make it happen
and david goggins
if lex doesn't do some super macho thing
because he's got to work
uh to get some of this stuff down done
you'll understand he'll be available to
you after april
thank you for the thank you for the
escape clause i really needed that
escape clause i'm glad that i'm worried
48 miles in 48 hours
by the way i just want to say how much i
admire
your willingness to keep this kind of
hardcore attitude
um i know that russians have it and
russian jews have it in spades but it's
harder to do
in a society that's sloppy and that's
weak
and that's lazy and the fact that you
bring so much heart
to saying i'm going to bring this to jiu
jitsu i'm going to bring this to guitar
i'm going to bring this to ai i'm going
to bring this to podcasting
it comes through loud and clear i just
find it completely and utterly inspiring
that you keep this kind of hardcore
aspect at the same time that you're the
guy who's extolling the virtue of love
in a modern society and doing it at
scale
thank you that means a lot i don't know
why i'm doing it but i'm just following
my heart on it
and just going with the gut it seems to
make sense somehow i i personally think
we better get tougher or we're going to
get in a world of pain and i
i do think that when it comes time to
lead uh it's great to have people who
you know don't crack under pressure do
you mind if we
talk about love and what it takes to be
a father for a bit
sure do you mind if zev joins us i'd be
an honor
so eric i've talked to your son zev
who's an incredible
human being but let me uh
ask you this might be difficult because
you're both sitting together
what advice do you have for him
as he makes his way in this world
especially given that as we mentioned
before on joe rogan
you're flawed in that just like all
humans you're mortal
well at some level i guess one of
my issues is that i've got to stop
giving quite so much advice
uh early on i was very worried
that i could see zeb's abilities and i
could see his
challenges and i saw them in terms of
myself
so a certain amount of zev rhymes with
whatever i went through as a kid and
i don't want to doom him to the same
outcomes that
that sufficed for me i think that he's
got a much better head on his shoulders
at age 15 he's much better adjusted
and in part it's important for me to
recognize that because i think i did a
reasonably decent job early on i don't
need
to get this part right and
you know i'm looking at at zev's
trajectory and saying
you're going to need to be incredibly
even pathologically self-confident
the antidote for that is going to be
something you're going to need to carry
on board which is radical humility
and you're going to have to have those
in a dialectical tension which is never
resolved which is a huge burden
you are going to have to forgive people
who do not appreciate your gifts
because your gifts are clearly evident
and many people will have to pretend not
to see them because if they
see your gifts then they're gonna have
to question their entire approach to
education
or employment or critical thinking
and what my hope is is that you can just
forgive those who don't see them
and who complicate and frustrate your
life and realize that you're gonna have
to take care of them too
seth let me ask you the more challenging
question because the guy is sitting
right here
what advice do you have for your dad
since uh after talking to you i realize
you're the uh the more brilliant aside
from the
the better looking uh member of the
family
um
odd question yeah um sorry i could say
anything you want is the last time we're
gonna be seeing left
awkward drive home
[Laughter]
i think sort of a new perspective
i've taken on parenting is that it
is a task for which no human is really
supposed to be prepared you know there
are
in jewish tradition for example there
are
myriad analogies in the torah and the
talmud
that compare the role of a parent
to the role of a god right no human
is prepared to play god and create and
guide
a life but somehow we're forced into it
as
as people um and i think sometimes it's
hard for
uh children to understand that however
their
their parents are failing um
is is something for for which we must
budget because our parents
play a role in our lives uh of which
they're
they're not worthy and they devote
themselves to
uh regardless because that becomes who
they are in a certain sense so
i hope to um
i hope to have realistic realistic
expectations
of you as a human because i think
too often it's easy to have godly
expectations of people who are
far from such a role and i think
i'm really happy that you've been as
open as you have with me about
the fact that um
you know you really you don't pretend to
be a god in my life
you you are
a guide who allows me to see myself
and that's been very important
considering the fact that
by your self-teaching paradigm
i will have to i will have to guide
myself
and being able to see it and see myself
accurately has been one of the greatest
gifts that you've
you've given me so i'm very appreciative
and uh i want you to know that
i don't buy into the the role that
you're
you're supposed to um
sort of fake your way through uh in my
in my life but i
i'm unbelievably happy with
uh a more realistic connection that
we've been
able to build in lieu of it so i think
it's been easier on you
actually as you come to realize what i
don't know what i can't do
and that there's been a period of time i
guess that's fascinating to me
where you're sort of surprised that i
don't know the answer to a certain
thing as well as you do and that
i remember going through this with a
particular mathematician who i held and
i still hold in awe
named david kajdan and you know he
famously
said to him and weirdly our family knew
his family in the soviet union but
he said you know eric i always
appreciate you coming to my office
because i always find what you have to
say interesting but you have to realize
that in the areas that you're talking
about you are no longer the student you
are actually my teacher and i wasn't
prepared
to hear that and there are many ways in
which as i was just saying with the
mozart
i am learning at an incredible rate from
you
i used to learn from you because i
didn't understand what was possible you
were
you were very much i mean this is the
weird thing there used to be this thing
called harvey the invisible rabbit this
guy
could had a rabbit that was like six
feet tall that only he could see maybe
he was
talking and that was like you at age
four
as you were saying batshit crazy things
that were all
totally sensible and nobody else could
put them together and so
what's wonderful is that the world
hasn't caught on
but enormous numbers of people are
starting to
and i really do hope that
that genuineness of spirit and that
outside the box
intellectual commitment serves you well
as the world starts to appreciate
that i think you're a very trustworthy
voice you don't get everything right
but the idea that we have somebody at
your age who's embedded in your
generation who can tell
us something about what's happening is
really valuable to me and i do hope that
you'll
consider boosting that voice more than
just at the dinner table
i apologize for saying this four-letter
word
but do you love
i was really worried it was going to be
another four-letter word
there's so many easy choices it doesn't
even rise
to the level of a question i mean i just
there are a tiny number of people with
whom
you share so much life that
you can't even think of yourself in
their absence and
and i don't know if that would find that
but
it's you can have a kid and
never make this level of connection
i think i think even right down to the
fact that you know when
when zev chooses boogie woogie piano
for his own set of reasons why i would
choose boogie woogie piano if i could
play in any style
um it's a it's a question about a
decrease in loneliness
you know like my grandfather played the
mandolin
and i had to learn some mandolin because
otherwise that instrument would go
silent
you don't expect that you get this much
of a chance to leave this much of
yourself
in another person who
is choosing it and recreating it rather
than it being
directly instilled and my proudest
achievement is in a certain sense having
not
taught him and and have having shared
this much so
you know it's not even love it's like
well beyond
so you mentioned love
for you making a less lonely world
i think i speak for i would argue
probably
millions of people that you eric because
this is a conversation with you
have made for many people from me
a less lonely world and i can't wait to
see how user developed as an intellect
but also
i'm so heartwarned by
the optimism and the hopefulness that
was in you
that i hope develops further and
lastly i'm deeply thankful that you eric
are
my friend and would give me
would honor me with this watch
it means more than words can say thanks
guys thanks for talking today
thank you thanks for listening to this
conversation with eric weinstein and
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and now let me leave you with some words
from socrates
to find yourself think for yourself
thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time